









X - £ £2 











CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 


VOLUME V 
The Official 
Oxford Conference 
Books 


THE OFFICIAL OXFORD CONFERENCE BOOKS 


1. THE CHURCH AND ITS FUNCTION IN SOCIETY 

by Dr. W. A. Visser’t Hooft and Dr. J. H. Oldham 

2. THE CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF MAN 

by Prof. T. E. Jessop, Prof. R. L. Calhoun, Prof. N. N. Alexeiev, Prof. 
Emil Brunner, Pastor Pierre Maury, the Rev. Austin Farrer, Prof. W. M. 
Horton 

3. THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND HISTORY 

by Prof. C. H. Dodd, Dr. Edwyn Bevan, Dr. Christopher Dawson, Prof. 
Eugene Lyman, Prof. Paul Tillich, Prof. H. Wendland, Prof. H. G. 
Wood 

4. CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE COMMON LIFE 

by Nils Ehrenstrom, Prof. M. Dibelius, Prof. John Bennett, The Arch¬ 
bishop of York, Prof. Reinhold Niebuhr, Prof. H. H. Farmer, Dr. 
W. Wiesner 

5. CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 

by Prof. E. E. Aubrey, Prof. E. Barker, Dr. Bjorkquist, Dr. H. Lilje, 
Prof. S. Zankov, Dr. Paul Douglass, Prof. K. S. Latourette, M. Boegner 

6. CHURCH, COMMUNITY, AND STATE IN RELA¬ 
TION TO EDUCATION 

by Prof. F. Clarke, Dr. Paul Monroe, Prof. W. Zenkovsky, C. R. Morris, 
J. W. D. Smith, “ X,” Prof. Ph. Kohnstamm, J. H. Oldham 

7. THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH AND THE WORLD OF 
NATIONS 

by the Marquess of Lothian, Sir Alfred Zimmern, Dr. O. von der 
Gablentz, John Foster Dulles, Prof. Max Huber, Pastor W. Menn, the 
Rev. V. A. Demant, Prof. Otto Piper, Canon C. E. Raven 

THE OXFORD CONFERENCE: Official Report 

Including the full text of the reports issued by the five sections of the 
Conference, Oxford, England, 1937. With an introduction by T. H. 
Oldham 

WORLD CHAOS OR WORLD CHRISTIANITY 

A popular interpretation of Oxford and Edinburgh, 1937 
by Henry Smith Leiper 


CHURCH and COMMUNITY 


A 


KENNETH S. LATOURETTE 
ERNEST BARKER 
MARC BOEGNER 
HANNS LILJE 
MANFRED BJORKQUIST 
STEFAN ZANKOV 
EDWIN E. AUBREY 
H. PAUL DOUGLASS 


Willett, Clark & Company 

CHICAGO NEW YORK 

1938 


mso 

.CS 


Copyright 1938 by 
WILLETT, CLARK & COMPANY 


Manufactured in The U. S. A. by The Plimpton Press 
Norwood, Mass.-La Porte, Ind. 


SEP -3 1938 


©ci A 


oV 


123027 




CONTENTS 


General Introduction vii 

Community and Church: An Historical Survey and 
Interpretation 3 

By K. S. Latourette 

Church and Community 21 

By Ernest Barker 

The Church and the Nation 63 

By Marc Boegner 

Church and Nation 85 

By Hanns Lilje 

The Idea of a National Church 117 

By Manfred Bjorkquist 

Nation and Church in the Orthodox Lands of East¬ 
ern Europe 131 

By Stefan Zankov 

Church and Community 171 

By Edwin Ewart Aubrey 

Church and Community in the United States 193 

By H. Paul Douglass 


v 









GENERAL INTRODUCTION 


Few will question the significance of the issues which en¬ 
gaged the attention of the conference on Church, Commu¬ 
nity, and State held at Oxford in July, 1937. More impor¬ 
tant than the conference itself is the continuing process, in 
which the conference was not more than an incident, of an 
attempt on the part of the Christian churches collectively 
— without, up to the present, the official participation of 
the Church of Rome, but not without the unofficial help 
of some of its thinkers and scholars 1 — to understand the 
true nature of the vital conflict between the Christian faith 
and the secular and pagan tendencies of our time, and to 
see more clearly the responsibilities of the church in rela¬ 
tion to the struggle. What is at stake is the future of Chris¬ 
tianity. The Christian foundations of western civilization 
have in some places been swept away and are everywhere 
being undermined. The struggle today concerns those 
common assumptions regarding the meaning of life with¬ 
out which, in some form, no society can cohere. These 
vast issues are focussed in the relation of the church to the 
state and to the community, because the non-Christian 
forces of today are tending more and more to find embodi¬ 
ment in an all-powerful state, committed to a particular 
philosophy of life and seeking to organize the whole of life 
in accordance with a particular doctrine of the end of 
man’s existence, and in an all-embracing community life 

1 A volume of papers by Roman Catholic writers dealing with subjects 
closely akin to the Oxford Conference and stimulated in part by the pre¬ 
paratory work for Oxford will be published shortly under the title Die 
Kirche Christi: ihre heilende, gestaltende und ordnende Kraft fur den 
Menschen und seine Welt. 

vii 


General Introduction 


viii 

which claims to be at once the source and the goal of all 
human activities: a state, that is to say, which aims at being 
also a church. 

To aid in the understanding of these issues the attempt 
was made in preparation for the conference at Oxford to 
enlist as many as possible of the ablest minds in different 
countries in a common effort to think out some of the 
major questions connected with the theme of the confer¬ 
ence. During the three years preceding the conference 
studies were undertaken wider in their range and more 
thorough in their methods than any previous effort of a 
similar kind on the part of the Christian churches. This 
was made possible by the fact that the Universal Christian 
Council for Life and Work, under whose auspices the con¬ 
ference was held, possessed a department of research at 
Geneva with two full-time directors and was also able, in 
view of the conference, to establish an office in London 
with two full-time workers and to set up an effective agency 
for the work of research in America. There was thus pro¬ 
vided the means of circulating in mimeographed form (in 
many instances in three languages) a large number of 
papers for comment, of carrying on an extensive and con¬ 
tinuous correspondence, and of maintaining close personal 
touch with many leading thinkers and scholars in different 
countries. 

Intensive study over a period of three years was devoted 
to nine main subjects. The results of this study are em¬ 
bodied in the six volumes to which this general introduc¬ 
tion relates and in two others. The plan and contents of 
each, and most of the papers, were discussed in at least two 
or three small international conferences or groups. The 
contributions were circulated in first draft to a number of 
critics in different countries and comments were received 
often from as many as thirty or forty persons. Nearly all 


General Introduction 


ix 


the papers were revised, and in some instances entirely 
rewritten, in the light of these criticisms. 

Both the range of the contributions and the fact that the 
papers have taken their present shape as the result of a wide 
international interchange of ideas give these books an ecu¬ 
menical character which marks a new approach to the sub¬ 
jects with which they deal. They thus provide an oppor¬ 
tunity such as has hardly existed before for the study in an 
ecumenical context of some of the grave and pressing prob¬ 
lems which today concern the Christian church through¬ 
out the world. 

The nine subjects to which preparatory study was de¬ 
voted were the following: 

1. The Christian Understanding of Man. 

2. The Kingdom of God and History. 

3. Christian Faith and the Common Life. 

4. The Church and Its Function in Society. 

5. Church and Community. 

6. Church and State. 

7. Church, Community and State in Relation to the Eco¬ 

nomic Order. 

8. Church, Community and State in Relation to Educa¬ 

tion. 

9. The Universal Church and the World of Nations. 

The last six of these subjects were considered at the Ox¬ 
ford Conference, and the reports prepared by the sections 
into which the conference was divided will be found in 
the official report of the conference entitled The Oxford 
Conference, Official Report. (Willett, Clark & Company). 

A volume on The Church and its Function in Society, 
by Dr. W. A. Visser’t Hooft and Dr. J. H. Oldham (Wil¬ 
lett, Clark & Company), was published prior to the con¬ 
ference. 

Three of the volumes in the present series of six have to 


X 


General Introduction 


do with the first three subjects in the list already given. 
These are fundamental issues which underlie the study of 
all the other subjects. The titles of these volumes are: 

The Christian Understanding of Man. 

The Kingdom of God and History. 

The Christian Faith and the Common Life. 

The remaining three volumes in the series are a contribu¬ 
tion to the study of three of the main subjects considered 
by the Oxford Conference. These are: 

Church and Community. 

Church, Community and State in Relation to Education. 

The Universal Church and the World of Nations. 

The subject of church and state is treated in a book by 
Mr. Nils Ehrenstrom, one of the directors of the research 
department. This has been written in the light of discus¬ 
sions in several international conferences and groups and 
of a wide survey of the relevant literature, and has been 
published under the title Christian Faith and the Modern 
State (Willett, Clark & Company). 

The planning and shaping of the volume is to a large 
extent the work of the directors of the research depart¬ 
ment, Dr. Hans Schonfeld and Mr. Nils Ehrenstrom. The 
editorial work and the preparation of the volumes for the 
press owes everything to the continuous labor of Miss Olive 
Wyon, who has also undertaken or revised the numerous 
translations, and in the final stages to the Rev. Edward S. 
Shillito, who during the last weeks accepted the responsi¬ 
bility of seeing the books through the press. Valuable 
help and advice was also given throughout the undertak¬ 
ing by Professor H. P. Van Dusen and Professor John 
Bennett of America. 

J. H. OLDHAM 

CHAIRMAN OF THE INTERNATIONAL 
RESEARCH COMMISSION 


LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 


Latourette, Kenneth Scott, b.s., b.a., m.a., ph.d., d.d. 

D. Willis James Professor of Missions and Oriental History in Yale 
University. Formerly Professor of History in Denison University, 
Granville, Ohio. 

Publications: History of Early American Relations between the 
United States and China; The Development of China; The Develop¬ 
ment of Japan; The Christian Basis of World Democracy; A History 
of Christian Missions in China; The Chinese: their History and Cul¬ 
ture; Missions to-morrow; A History of the Expansion of Christian¬ 
ity, Vol. I. 

Barker, Ernest, litt.d., d.litt., ll.d. 

Professor of Political Science, Cambridge, and Fellow of Peterhouse. 
Formerly Principal of King’s College, London University. 
Publications: The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle; The 
Dominican Order and Convocation; Political Thought in England 
from Herbert Spencer to To-day; The Crusades; National Character; 
Church, State and Study; Burke and Bristol; Translation of Gierke’s 
Natural Law and the Theory of Society. 

Boegner, marc, l.en d., d.theol., d.d. 

Pastor of the Reformed Church of France (Paris Passy). President of 
the Federation Protestante de France. 

Publications: La Vie et la Pens£e de T. Fallot; Dieu, l’eternel tour- 
ment des hommes; J£sus Christ; Qu’est-ce que l’Eglise? La Vie Chr£- 
tienne; Le Christ devant la Souffrance et devant la Joie. 

LlLJE, HaNNS, D.THEOL. 

General Secretary of the Lutheran World Convention. Editor of “ Die 
Furche.” 

Publications: Das technische Zeitalter; Luther’s Geschichts An- 
schauung. 

Bjorkquist, Manfred, lic.phil., dr.theol. 

Director of the Volkshochschule in Sigtuna, Sweden. Member of the 
General Assembly of the Church of Sweden. Chairman of the Edu¬ 
cation Association of the Swedish Church. 

xi 


List of Contributors 


xii 


Publications: Ridderlig Kamp; Eros och Persanliglieter; Sjalen och 
dass Herre; Livstro och Kristendom, etc.; Editor, VSr Losen. 


Zankov, Stefan, d.theol., d.juris., d.d. 

Professor in the University of Sofia. Formerly General Secretary of 
the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. 

Publications: Die Verfassung der bulgarischen orthodoxen Kirche; 
Die Verwaltung der bulgarischen orthodoxen Kirche; Das orthodoxe 
Christentum des Ostens; Nation, Staat, Welt und Kirche im ortho¬ 
doxen Osten; Die Lage und die Verfassung der neuesten orthodoxen 
Kirche; Das Eherecht von Sowjetrussland; Die Interkirchliche Lage 
der bulgarischen orthodoxen Kirche; Die albanische orthodoxe Kirche; 
Das Recht und die Kirche; Staat und Kirche. 

Aubrey, Edwin Ewart, m.a., b.d., ph.d. 

Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics and Chairman of the 
Theological Field, University of Chicago. Formerly Professor of Reli¬ 
gion at Vassar College. 

Publications: Religion and the Next Generation; Present Theological 
Tendencies; With others — Religion in Higher Education; The Process 
of Religion. 

Douglass, Harlan Paul, a.b., a.m., d.d. 

Research Director of the Institute of Social and Religious Research. 
Formerly Professor of Philosophy, Drury College, and Superintendent 
of Education, American Missionary Association. 

Publications: Christian Reconstruction in the South; The New Home 
Missions; The Little Town; The St. Louis Church Survey; The Sub¬ 
urban Trend; How Shall Country Youth be Served? The Church in 
the Changing City; How to Study the City Church; Church Comity; 
City’s Church; Protestant Co-operation in American Cities: Church 
Unity Movements in the United States. 

Translators 

M. Boegner’s paper was translated by Miss Olive Wyon; Professor 
Zankov’s paper by Mr. G. H. Boobyer; and Dr. Lilje’s paper by Miss 
L. Goodfellow. 


COMMUNITY AND CHURCH: 

AN HISTORICAL SURVEY AND INTER¬ 
PRETATION 


by 

K. S. Latourette 










































































































































































J. 


































































































































COMMUNITY AND CHURCH: AN HISTORICAL 
SURVEY AND INTERPRETATION 


The current relations between community and church 
can be understood only against the historical background 
out of which they have emerged. The present situation — 
or situations, for the scene is varied — has arisen out of 
particular sets of events. Moreover, the relationship has 
been profoundly altered in the past hundred and fifty 
years with results which are only now beginning to be 
fully apparent. Back of this change lie a number of causes. 
Several of these are obvious and have often been com¬ 
mented upon. Others, among them some of primary im¬ 
portance, appear to have been overlooked. It need scarcely 
be said that in a paper as brief as this must necessarily be, 
the moving panorama of the past can be painted only with 
the broadest possible strokes. Most of the details and 
qualifying incidents must be omitted. 

(1) First of all, we must remind ourselves that since the 
dawn of recorded history every community has tended to 
have its own religion, to which all the members of that com¬ 
munity have adhered as a matter of course. Each tribe 
has had its deities or patron saints by whom it is supposed to 
be aided and whom in turn it is supposed to serve. The 
Greek cities possessed their gods and the Greeks as a whole 
were bound together in part by a pantheon common to 
them all. In the Roman Empire an official religion was 
patronized by the imperial authorities. The Jews acknowl¬ 
edged Yahveh. For the Chinese empire Confucianism 
became the faith of the community and other religions 

3 


Church and Community 


4 

were tolerated only in so far as they did not interfere too 
greatly with the established system. Zoroastrianism be¬ 
came the religion of the Persians. 

Frequently, to be sure, in a given community more than 
one religion has existed. Indeed, more than one may be 
given the formal patronage of the community. Thus in 
the old Japan Buddhism, Shinto and Confucianism existed 
side by side, each accorded community support. In the 
Roman Empire before Constantine, some gods were offi¬ 
cially recognized and their cults maintained as matters of 
community concern, while many cults existed to which 
formal recognition was not granted but which were toler¬ 
ated so long as their adherents did not become too serious 
a menace to the state and to the official cults. This medley 
of religions was in part a consequence of the imperfect 
fusion of previously existing communities into the new and 
larger community embraced by the Roman Empire. So 
Judaism went on as the religion of an ancient community 
within the confines of the larger community of the Greco- 
Roman world. 

Often the faith of the community has been compelled to 
struggle to maintain itself against other religions entering 
from other communities. Of one of those series of struggles 
the Old Testament gives eloquent witness. 

Sometimes the community has tolerated private skepti¬ 
cism as to the validity of its accepted religion if this skep¬ 
ticism is not expressed with too much indiscretion and if 
it does not interfere with the maintenance of the public 
ritual of the official cult. Thus in the Roman Empire 
doubt as to many of the beliefs of the community religion 
was widespread, but so long as the doubters were willing to 
participate in the customary religious forms they were 
molested little if at all. 

Christianity began as a minority faith within the com- 


K. S. Latourette 


5 

munity of the Roman Empire. It immediately gave rise 
to what was in some respects a community of its own, the 
church. The church regarded itself as inheriting the di¬ 
vine favor once reserved for the Jews — as being “the 
Israel of God.” By members of the general community 
about it Christians were regarded as traitors and were per¬ 
secuted, first by the Jews and then by the general body of 
the population of the Mediterranean world. Because they 
declined to join in the religious observances of the com¬ 
munity they were declared to be atheists and hence odious. 
Their abstinence from the community cult was pilloried 
as a cause of the misfortunes which overtook the Greco- 
Roman world in the third and fourth centuries. Vigorous 
and bloody attempts were made to force them to conform. 

(2) In the second place, it is important to recall that 
until about a century and a half ago, Christianity, where it 
was the predominant religion, was accepted as a commu¬ 
nity affair. When in the time of Constantine persecutions 
ceased, it was because Christianity had been formally 
adopted by the Greco-Roman community. At first it was 
taken over as simply one of the community’s religions and 
was carried on side by side with the older community cults. 
Later it was made the only religion of the community, and 
from it the Jews alone permanently dissented. When, 
beginning with the fifth century, the Roman Empire 
shrank to the remnant which was continued in the Byzan¬ 
tine empire, and what had been the Greco-Roman com¬ 
munity disintegrated, the church of the Roman Empire 
broke up into regional bodies and the various resulting 
branches continued in close association with the successor 
communities. So one form of Monophysitism became the 
faith of the Coptic community. Another strain of Mo¬ 
nophysitism became the religion of the Syrians on the 
Mediterranean littoral. The community which formed 


6 


Church and Community 


the heart of the Byzantine empire and had Greek for its 
preponderating language, as its religion had what we now 
denominate the Greek Orthodox Church. In the West 
what we now term the Roman Catholic Church became 
the prevailing faith. Largely because of that church, 
moreover, western Europe was drawn together into what 
was in many respects a community. 

Throughout the fifteen hundred years between the third 
and the nineteenth centuries Christianity was again and 
again adopted as the faith of a community. Indeed, con¬ 
version was by the community as a whole rather than by 
individuals. To be sure, mass baptism was practically al¬ 
ways preceded by the baptism of a few scattered individuals 
or families. Eventually, however, the community as a 
whole adopted Christianity. Sometimes this step was taken 
because of the example set by the accepted leaders. In 
other instances, the leaders coerced the subject majority 
into following them to the baptismal font. Not infre¬ 
quently a foreign conqueror by persuasion, by the induce¬ 
ment of privileges to Christians, or by actual force, brought 
a community into the fold of the church. 

One of the first communities to adhere to the Christian 
faith en masse was that of Armenia. So much was conver¬ 
sion there a community affair that the king led the way and 
at least some of the priests of the former community cult 
became priests of the new faith. The rapid conversion of 
the Roman Empire which followed upon the adoption of 
Christianity by Constantine and his successors constitutes 
the major example in history of the transfer to Christianity 
of the religious loyalty of a community. In the conversion 
of the Franks and of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, we have 
instances of the voluntary conformity of the community to 
the example of the natural leaders. In Norway we have 
an example of the use of force by the king to induce his 


K. S. Latourette 


7 

subjects to accept baptism. In the case of the Saxons, of 
some of the Wends in the present Germany, and of several 
of the peoples on the southern and eastern shores of the 
Baltic, we have the vigorous employment of force by a con¬ 
queror to compel an alien community to change its reli¬ 
gion. In the extensive Spanish and Portuguese conquests 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Americas 
and Asia are many examples of a conqueror inducing sub¬ 
ject communities to adopt Christianity. Here armed force 
was usually not employed so boldly and ruthlessly to bring 
this about as it had been earlier among the Saxons or in the 
Baltic countries in the Middle Ages. However, pressure 
was brought in other ways. 

(3) In the third place, acceptance of Christianity by the 
community did not preclude a certain amount of unbelief. 
In the Europe of medieval times, so often regarded as the 
age of faith, skepticism was widespread among both masses 
and leaders. Only infrequently was it carefully reasoned. 
That it existed and was extensive must be obvious to every 
student of the period. The contempt in which the clergy 
were so often held by the laity, the neglect of attendance 
upon religious services, the quips at the expense of religion 
which passed from lip to lip, and the callous simony and 
nepotism on the part of so many of the clergy, indicate a 
practical and extensive lack of confidence in the validity 
of the claims of the Christian religion. Yet widespread as 
were incredulity and indifference, in theory Christianity 
was the faith of all but the Jews, and against the latter 
chronic resentment broke out from time to time in violent 
spasms. Generally, too, the community abhorred heresy 
and sanctioned strenuous measures for its eradication. All 
but the recalcitrant Jews were baptized and subject to the 
church. 

In the time of the Renaissance skepticism became more 


8 


Church and Community 


obvious. Many of the clergy, even of the highest ranks, 
were infected with it. Yet even then Christianity remained 
officially the faith of the community and all conformed to 
some of its sacraments. 

As late as the eighteenth century, when criticism of the 
church and of basic Christian convictions became popular 
in Europe, baptism and a formal connection with the 
church were still the custom. Even Voltaire was baptized 
and was buried in consecrated ground. 

(4) In the fourth place, it is highly significant that 
always, even when Christianity has become the faith of the 
community, a tension has existed between the Christian 
conscience and the standards of the community. In the 
centuries before Constantine this expressed itself in denun¬ 
ciations of the current idolatry and of the gods and of many 
of the moral practices of the pagan majority. When, in 
the fourth century, thousands poured into the church and 
Christianity was adopted by the Greco-Roman world, the 
tension found outlet partly through monasticism. The 
monks rejected the compromises of Christian ethical stand¬ 
ards in the community religion which passed for Chris¬ 
tianity, and dwelt apart as anchorites or in groups where 
they could make the effort to attain to what they regarded 
as Christian ideals. 

At first many of the official leaders of the church looked 
askance at the monks, but eventually monasticism was 
accepted as a valid expression of Christianity and as a nor¬ 
mal phase of the life of a community which had Chris¬ 
tianity for its faith. 

However, the sense of contrast between the ideals found 
in the New Testament on the one hand and the practices 
of the nominally Christian community and of most of the 
clerical hierarchy on the other, could not be ignored. 
Throughout the Middle Ages fresh protests arose. Some 


K. S. Latourette 


9 

of these sought to draw more nearly into approximation 
with New Testament standards the lives of all Christians. 
The Cluniac movement endeavored to bring all the clergy 
to the chastity enjoined of monks and to purge the church 
of simony, nepotism and other departures from Christian 
ethics. Again and again protests were made against the 
luxury, avarice and pride of the clergy. In such efforts as 
the Peace of God and the Truce of God measures were 
undertaken to bring within bounds the private warfare 
and robbery which plagued the land. Many of these 
movements remained within the church of the com¬ 
munity, usually as new monastic orders. The Cistercians, 
the Carthusians and the Franciscans are only a few among 
the many of this type. Others broke with the official 
church or were cast out by it. The Lollards, the Poor 
Men of Lyons, and the followers of John Huss come im¬ 
mediately to mind as outstanding examples of these “ here¬ 
tics.” 

In spite of skepticism on the one hand, and on the 
other of protests against the laxity of the majority who 
bore the name of Christian, all through the Middle Ages 
church and community remained practically co-extensive. 
Except for Moslem and Jewish minorities and a very few 
pagans in the north, by 1500 all the peoples of western 
Europe called themselves Christian. In the Near East 
were Christian minorities who were offering a stubborn 
resistance to the prevailing Islam. They were slowly los¬ 
ing members. Yet part of their strength lay in the fact 
that with them, too, church and community were so closely 
interrelated — that to be a member of the Greek, or the 
Armenian, or the Coptic community was to be a member 
of the church associated with that community. 

(5) In the fifth place, in western Europe the Protestant 
Reformation did not diminish the intimacy of this re- 


io 


Church and Community 


lation between church and community. To a very large 
extent, the secessions from the Roman Catholic Church 
were by communities. In Scandinavia, much of Germany, 
the northern portions of the Low Countries, England, and 
Scotland — to mention only part of the list — this was 
the case. Indeed, now that the tie with Rome was broken, 
community and church were even more closely bound to¬ 
gether. Rome had made for a church which in many of 
its features transcended the various local communities of 
western Europe, and was the chief bond of a somewhat 
nebulous but still real community which might be termed 
Western Christendom. The Reformation, by shattering 
this unity through Rome, encouraged the processes by 
which the several regional churches took on the color of 
their respective communities. Particular types of Protes¬ 
tantism, moreover, molded particular communities. 
Thus modern Scotland owes many of its characteristics to 
Calvinism, and modern Scandinavia to Lutheranism. 

The Protestant Reformation did not bring to an end 
the tension between the Christian conscience stirred by 
the New Testament and the sub-Christian practices of the 
nominally Christian communities. If anything, it accen¬ 
tuated it. The Trentine reforms were partially an answer 
to the Protestant challenge and partly the fruit of the 
efforts of those who, while remaining within the Roman 
Catholic Church, wished to make it approximate more 
closely to New Testament standards. Within that ancient 
body, moreover, new monastic orders arose from the 
dreams of those who wished to live the perfect Christian 
life. Here and there, too, a voice was raised, like that of 
Las Casas, against the denial of Christian ethics by the 
deeds of professing Christians. From within Protes¬ 
tantism movements emerged in protest against what were 
deemed the laxities and corruptions of the prevailing nom- 


K. S. Latourette 


i 1 

inal Christianity of the community. Some of these, like 
Pietism, remained within the official church. Others, like 
Puritanism, attempted to transform the official church, but 
ultimately were forced to break with it. Still others, like 
the Independents and the Quakers, from almost the first 
separated from the state church and became “ sects.” 

However, until almost the close of the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury, church and community continued the tradition of 
close association: to be a member of a given community 
was automatically to be a member of a particular branch 
of the church. In this Christianity was repeating the ex¬ 
perience of other religions. 

(6) In the sixth place, commencing with the latter 
part of the eighteenth century, a development began which 
was new not only in the history of Christianity but also 
in the history of other religions — a divorce between 
church and community and the presence of large numbers 
of heretofore nominally Christian communities who had 
no formal connection either with the church or with any 
other recognized religion. This first appeared in the 
British colonies of North America — the later United 
States. In some of these colonies a connection with the 
church was almost universal. In others a large proportion 
of the population appear to have had no connection. 
Within two generations independence was followed by dis¬ 
establishment of the church in such of the colonies as had 
had a formal association of church and state. By 1783 it 
is said that about nine-tenths of the population were with¬ 
out membership in the church. In Europe the French 
Revolution was accompanied by the disavowal by thou¬ 
sands of an affiliation with the church. In the course of 
the nineteenth century, in a number of countries the ties 
which had bound state with church were severed. Both 
state and church had traditionally been expressions of the 


12 


Church and Community 


life of the community and both had embraced practically 
the entire community. The separation of church from 
state was frequently an indication that the church could no 
longer claim all the members of the community as its own. 
By the end of the nineteenth century, millions in what had 
once been known as Christendom were without any con¬ 
nection with the church. They had not even been bap¬ 
tized as infants. 

For this termination of the time-honored bond between 
church and community two contradictory factors are re¬ 
sponsible. 

One of these is fairly obvious and has often been de¬ 
scribed. It is a widespread skepticism and indifference. 
As we have suggested, neither the skepticism nor the in¬ 
difference is new. Both have been found ever since Chris¬ 
tianity first became a community faith. What is novel is 
the open rejection of Christianity and the failure to es¬ 
tablish even a nominal membership in the church. Re¬ 
ligion represented by Christianity is believed to be in¬ 
tellectually untenable or irrelevant to the burning issues 
of contemporary life or incapable of providing men and 
women with what they most want. As a result, some¬ 
times an open attack is made on Christianity, and the break 
with the church is conscious and bitter. At other times 
the church is simply ignored. 

The second cause is the increased vitality of the church. 
Not always do we recognize the fact that Christianity was 
never quite so vigorous as it has been in the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries. In no other century and a half 
has it given rise to so many new movements. In that time 
Roman Catholicism has given birth to more orders and 
congregations than in all the preceding course of its his¬ 
tory — and a new order or congregation is evidence of deep 
conviction and fresh energy. Within Protestantism has 


K. S. Latourette 


*3 

broken forth revival after revival and such new creations 
have appeared as the Sunday schools, the Young Men’s and 
Young Women’s Christian associations, the Young People’s 
Society for Christian Endeavor, and the many student 
Christian organizations. Many new denominations have 
come into being — and as a rule a new denomination is 
evidence that to enough people Christianity has come as a 
sufficiently fresh and powerful experience to lead them to 
express their faith in an original fashion. Out of Chris¬ 
tianity have emerged powerful efforts for social reform. 
The antislavery movement had Christian roots. So did 
much of the impulse toward ameliorating the treatment of 
prisoners, toward the improvement of the lot of the under¬ 
privileged, and toward the abolishment of war. 

Moreover, the past century and a half have been the 
greatest missionary era in the history of the church. The 
huge migrations of European peoples to the Americas, 
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, have been followed 
and a large proportion of the immigrants held to their 
hereditary faith. Among non-Christian peoples Chris¬ 
tianity has been propagated over a wider area than any re¬ 
ligion or any other set of ideas has been spread by 
professional agents in the entire history of mankind. 
These professional missionaries have been supported by 
the voluntary gifts of more millions than have ever before 
contributed of their own free will to the spread of any 
faith. The missionaries have reduced to writing more 
tongues than had previously in all the experience of man¬ 
kind been given a written form. They have been the 
schoolmasters of millions of non-Europeans. In one great 
land, China, almost singlehanded they laid the founda¬ 
tions of a modern medical profession. They have pro¬ 
foundly modified the cultures which are emerging from the 
impact of the Occident upon non-Occidental peoples. 


Church and Community 


14 

They have been the instruments for bringing into existence 
growing Christian communities in most parts of what has 
usually been termed the non-Christian world. 

This abounding vigor within Christianity, it may be well 
to note, has expressed itself in activity and in the spiritual 
and moral change of individuals and groups rather than 
in the creation of fresh theologies. Out of this life no 
new system of theology has yet emerged which for breadth 
of scope and commanding intellectual power equals that 
of Thomas Aquinas. Yet we need to remind ourselves 
that in most of the great revivals of Christianity theologi¬ 
cal creativity has followed and not preceded the new burst 
of life. The Franciscan and Dominican movements did 
not arise out of new theologies, but were one source of the 
stimulus which produced a whole series of great formula¬ 
tions of theology. Calvin’s Institutes came after Luther 
and not before him. Back of the Pietist and Wesleyan 
movements lay no commanding new theological system. 
We must not, then, scorn this nineteenth and twentieth 
century awakening within the Christian churches or un¬ 
derestimate its significance because of its relative theologi¬ 
cal sterility. 

This increased vitality in organized Christianity during 
the past century and a half has helped to sharpen the dis¬ 
tinction between church and community and has served to 
strengthen the drift of a large proportion of the community 
away from the church. By and large the newly invigorated 
church strove to make its life accord more closely with the 
standards of the New Testament. This led to uneasiness 
over the compromises entailed in the traditional and pre¬ 
vailing forms of association between church and com¬ 
munity. In an attempt to make the church more consistent 
with its Christian profession came the Oxford Movement 
and the Free Church of Scotland. In numbers of regions, 
as in the United States, the new life strengthened denomi- 


K. S. Latourette 


*5 

nations outside of branches of the church which were estab¬ 
lished by law and contributed to disestablishment. In gen¬ 
eral in western Europe and in the new and growing com¬ 
munities of Europeans overseas the standards of church 
membership rose. Christians became more uneasy over 
the contradiction between the kind of life to which their 
faith called them and the ethics of the nominally Christian 
community. Membership in the church tended to be from 
individual volition and not to follow automatically upon 
birthright in a community. 

The extent of this heightened requirement for partici¬ 
pation in the church can easily be exaggerated. In many 
communities, especially in Europe, the old tradition per¬ 
sisted. In the United States, where the break with the 
past was marked, the proportion of the population hav¬ 
ing a formal church connection increased in the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries until it became approximately half 
of the whole. Obviously to many of these millions church 
membership did not entail any drastic dissent from the 
mores of the community. 

However, when all of these qualifications have been 
made, the fact remains that in the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries the tendency was to make membership in the 
church more exacting in its demands upon conduct and in 
its understanding of Christian teachings. It is significant 
that on the geographic frontiers of the church, in what is 
usually termed the foreign mission field, the majority of 
both Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries insisted 
upon a longer period of probation, upon more instruction 
and upon higher standards of conduct for admission to the 
church than had been general since the earliest Christian 
centuries. Indeed, it may be that not even in the first three 
centuries had the requirements for admission from pa¬ 
ganism been so high. 

For strangely diverse reasons, then, the past century and 


16 Church and Community 

a half have seen the traditionally intimate association be¬ 
tween the church and community weakened and the con¬ 
trast between the two accentuated. For the first time in 
human history multitudes have been born, grown to man¬ 
hood, and died without having even a formal connection 
with what is usually termed religion. In the twentieth 
century this tendency has been accelerated. 

(7) Finally, it must be noted that the religious vacuum 
thus created has not remained unfilled. New enthusiasms 
have entered to take the place left vacant as Christianity 
has either voluntarily abdicated or been ushered out of its 
position as the faith of the community. Never for long 
has there ever been a community without some kind of 
community faith. Now that in many communities Chris¬ 
tianity is ceasing to be that faith another has come in. 
That new faith is nationalism in one of its varied forms. 
In each land nationalism becomes attached to a particular 
set of ideas which it espouses with passionate devotion. 
The Holy Russia of today is more ardently nationalistic 
than ever, but is now the exponent not of the Orthodox 
Church, but of a Russian interpretation of the dogmas of 
Karl Marx. Italian nationalism has become the champion 
of fascism, and German nationalism of National Socialism. 
Only twenty years ago the United States entered the World 
War, ostensibly to “ make the world safe for democracy/’ 
partly because President Wilson and millions of his fellow 
countrymen were persuaded that otherwise democracy of 
the American type could not continue to exist. By de¬ 
cisions of the Supreme Court allegiance to the United 
States has priority over allegiance to the Christian con¬ 
science. Nationalism is, of course, not confined to so-called 
Christendom. It has Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and 
Turkish forms. Nearly always it is associated with a par¬ 
ticular set of dogmas. Everywhere except in Japan it tends 


K. S. Latourette 


17 

to fill the gap left by the weakening of previous faiths, and 
in Japan it is associated with an ancient national cult, 
Shinto, which was already to hand. 

What does all this mean for the future? No one with 
a historical training ought confidently to predict. History 
is haunted by the ghosts of unfulfilled prophecies. How¬ 
ever, it must be clear that it does not, as is so frequently 
assumed, necessarily mean the disappearance of Christi¬ 
anity. We need to recall that not only are we witnessing 
a widespread renunciation of Christianity, but also that 
the church has never been so vigorous and so widely influ¬ 
ential in the affairs of men as in the nineteenth and twen¬ 
tieth centuries. To be sure, in the past two decades the 
church has been dealt some severe blows. It seems fairly 
clear that in the years just ahead the conflict between Chris¬ 
tian ideals and the ideals and practices of at least some of 
the communities in which the church is set is to become 
more acute, with fresh persecutions for Christians. For 
this Christians must be prepared. He would be a rash 
prophet, however, who would forecast in this the collapse 
of the church or the passing of its faith. 











CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 

by 

Ernest Barker 







CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 


1. COMMUNITY 

We use a number of words in English — people, nation, 
society, and community — which all have different shades 
of meaning, but which are all so closely related that they 
possess, or at any rate seem to possess, a fundamental unity. 
We also use a word which is common to most European 
languages — the word state. It is a word related to the first 
set of words; but it is not so much related but that it 
may be distinguished. To state its differentia and to ex¬ 
press its particular connotation may be the best way of 
arriving at an understanding of the first set of words. 

(1) A state is a legal association, or, as some say, a juridi¬ 
cal organization. Membership of the state is a legal fact, 
depending on some sort of legal act, such as registration 
or naturalization. The state itself is constituted by a legal 
act, or a series of successive legal acts, called a constitution; 
it is “ constituted ” in the sense that the mode of its activity 
is determined by such act or series of acts. That activity 
always assumes a legal form. It consists in the declaration 
and enforcement of general rules of law, within the terms 
and subject to the prescriptions of the constitution. The 
state exists by the grace of law, and for the purpose of law. 
We may almost say that it is law. 1 

i “ We may almost say that the state is law This suggestion was chal¬ 
lenged by a group of Chinese thinkers, on the ground that law is abstract 
and impersonal, that Christianity has a higher ideal which is concrete and 
personal, and that it is the duty of the church constantly to remind the 
state and the law of this higher reference. But all that was intended by 
the writer was to suggest that the state necessarily acts by the form or 


21 


22 


Church and Community 


To say that the state is constituted — which means, in 
effect, created — by a legal act is not to say that it is created 
by the putting together of individuals hitherto separate, 
or, in other words, by an act of contract between such in¬ 
dividuals. What actually happens is something at once 
more simple and more subtle. It is possible to conceive a 
legal association or juridical organization as being “ con¬ 
stituted,” not by the drawing together of parts which were 
hitherto separate into a whole which is utterly new, but by 
the turning of some whole which already existed, but 
existed in another form, into the new form of such an 
association or organization. What is new, in such a case, 
is not the whole itself, but the new form of the whole and 
the new mode of its activity. The whole which existed be¬ 
fore still continues to exist, in its old form and with its old 
mode, or modes, of activity; but henceforth it assumes, or 
rather adds, a new form and a new mode of activity. This 
is a line of thought and a method of interpretation which 
we may properly apply to the state. It is a legal association, 
or juridical organization, which has been constituted from 
a previously existing whole. That whole is a people, na¬ 
tion, society or community. When it becomes a state, or 
comes to be regarded as a state, this whole does not cease 
to be what it was. It does not lose its previous form or 
its previous modes of activity. It simply adds a different 
form and a new and separate mode. 

It is difficult to avoid the language of time, or to speak 

method of law — that is to say, by general rules which can be generally en¬ 
forced. Nothing in this suggestion precludes a constant reference of the 
content of law to the Christian ideal. On the other hand, the neces¬ 
sity involved in the form of law — the necessity that the rule should be 
general and capable of general enforcement — does preclude the enact¬ 
ment of rules which cannot be made general and cannot be generally en¬ 
forced. The peril of the Christian churches is that they may urge the state 
to do what it cannot do — to make a law which cannot be a general rule for 
all and cannot be generally enforced. 



Ernest Barker 


23 

otherwise than in terms of an “ old ” or “ previously 
existing ” whole and a “ new ” or “ added ” form of that 
whole. There is this justification for such language that 
we sometimes find an existing group, which describes itself 
as a “ people ” or “ nation,” constituting itself as a state 
at a definite point of time. This is what happened, for 
example, in Czechoslovakia in 1920: “We, the Czecho¬ 
slovak nation, desiring to consolidate the perfect unity of 
our people ... to guarantee the peaceful development 
of our native Czechoslovak land . . . have adopted in our 
national assembly the following Constitution for the 
Czechoslovak Republic.” 2 But the separation, or dis¬ 
tinction, between people or nation and state is not really a 
matter of time. It is a matter of idea. There are consti¬ 
tutions, such as the English, which can hardly be dated 
in time. There are countries or areas where the concep¬ 
tion of the people, nation, society or community and the 
conception of the state seem coeval. But the two concep¬ 
tions nonetheless remain distinct. There is the conception 
of the state — the legal association, constituted by the con¬ 
stitution and acting in the mode of legal activity. There 
is the conception of the people, nation, society, or com¬ 
munity, which we have still to examine. The two may be 
one, so far as concerns the body of persons which they em¬ 
brace. In a perfect “ national state ” the state is the nation 
and the nation the state. But the two are two, and remain 
two, so far as concerns their form and their modes of 
activity. “ By the state,” says Bosanquet, “ we mean society 
as a unit recognized as rightly [legally?] exercising control 
over its members through absolute physical power [an 
adequate power of enforcing legal sanctions?].” 3 That 

2 Preamble to the preliminary law and constitutional charter of Febru¬ 
ary 29, 1920. 

3 B. Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 185. 


Church and Community 


24 

still leaves open the question what we mean by society, or 
community, as something other than such a unit. 

(2) Before we seek to answer that question — but also 
in order to prepare the way for an answer — it is well to 
choose among the alternative terms which are presented to 
us by the ordinary use of language. We want a word which 
is related to the word “ state,” but not so closely related 
that it may lead to confusion between the conception of 
the state and the other conception which we are seeking to 
express and to define. The word “ people,” in our usage, 
has a definite political connotation, and is closely related 
to the conception of the state. It is connected with the 
idea of democracy: when we talk, for example, of “ the will 
of the people,” we are apt to think of the electorate; and 
the adjective “ popular,” which is totally different from the 
German “ volkisch” suggests the idea of democratic gov¬ 
ernment. The word “ nation ” has in some ways a broader 
sense; but it also suffers from some defects. It too is closely 
connected, if in a different way, with the conception of the 
state; indeed when we speak of the League of Nations we 
are using the two words as if they were simply convertible, 
and when we speak of a “ national ” we are apt to mean a 
member of a state. The word “ nation ” is too much of 
an etatiste for our purposes; and it has besides the sugges¬ 
tion of a blood group, or body of kinsmen, which narrows 
its meaning and restricts its range. We are thus left with 
a choice between the words “ society ” and “ community.” 
Either will serve our purpose. Our English thinkers 
generally use the word “ society.” There is a danger in 
that word — not for ourselves, but for continental thinkers, 
who may read into the word suggestions which it does not 
carry for us. They may think that it suggests ideas of the 
societas of Roman law and the societe of French law, and 
that it therefore conveys notions of a business partnership 


Ernest Barker 


25 

or commercial company. No such idea or notion enters 
into our own usage; if there is any danger in the term, 
among ourselves, it is rather that it suggests, in common 
speech and ordinary parlance, the notion of “ good society ” 
or le grand monde. “ Community ” has no dangers: the 
only objection to it is that it escapes from any particular 
color so successfully that it is almost colorless. But it is 
coming into more general use and acquiring a more de¬ 
finite connotation. We speak, for example, of the do¬ 
minions as “ autonomous communities,” freely united in 
a broader community (or “ commonwealth ”) which is 
something more than a legal association, though it has 
some of the characteristics of such an association. We 
speak again of “ community associations ” — the voluntary 
bodies which have freely formed themselves for social and 
cultural purposes on our new municipal housing estates — 
and we speak of the “ community centers ” in which they 
freely meet and act. These usages indicate a sense of com¬ 
munity as something which — whatever the area of its op¬ 
eration, large or small — is essentially free and essentially 
voluntary. 

(3) It is important to notice at this point that our word 
“ community ” is a multi-colored sort of word. It has 
many areas of operation. The German word Volk is a 
unitary word. There is one Volk> though it may have two 
different manifestations according as we are thinking of 
the Volk already included in the boundaries of the German 
state or of the broader Volk which transcends those bound¬ 
aries. Our word “ community ” is essentially multiform. 
There is first the community of the British Common¬ 
wealth. It is real; but it is not readily definable by any 
objective criteria of blood or speech or creed or culture. 
Then there is the community of Great Britain. It is real; 
indeed, it is even more profoundly apprehended than the 


26 


Church and Community 


community of the Commonwealth, and its unity may be de¬ 
scribed by more definite marks or attributes. But it is not 
unitary or exclusive; and just as it co-exists with the 
broader community of the Commonwealth, so it also co¬ 
exists with the narrower communities, contained in itself, 
of England, Scotland and Wales. None of us can use the 
word community with the simple intensity with which the 
German uses the word Volk. When we think of com¬ 
munity, we see successive circles, which are far from fitting 
neatly into one another with geometrical precision. When 
we think of the relations of church and community, we are 
thus thinking of something different from the relation of 
Kirche and Volk. We are thinking of the relations of a 
church, which itself (as we shall see later) takes a number 
of different forms, to a community which is also multi¬ 
form. The problem, for us, is far from simple. Perhaps 
for that reason it is not an acute or dangerous problem. 
When Kirche confronts Volk, there may emerge either a 
plain dualism of the two, or a blunt demand for their 
“ assimilation.” When church confronts community, 
there is time to stop and think. 

It is tempting to classify our different spheres or areas 
of community in different categories. We might, for ex¬ 
ample, regard the community of the British Common¬ 
wealth as a general “ culture-circle we might regard the 
community of Great Britain as largely, or even mainly, a 
political community — though also something more: we 
might regard the community of Scotland or that of Wales 
as a “ national minority,” which as such has claims or rights 
to equal treatment with the national majority and to an 
equal respect for its speech and customs. The use of such 
categories would not help us: on the contrary, it would con¬ 
fuse understanding by suggesting differences which do not 
exist. The community of the British Commonwealth is 


Ernest Barker 


27 

a political community as well as a “ culture-circle the 
communities of Scotland and Wales are more than “ na¬ 
tional minorities.” There is a general notion of com¬ 
munity which is common to its different circles or manifes¬ 
tations; and though this general notion may be qualified, 
or rather specified in some particular way, in each particu¬ 
lar circle or manifestation, the general notion still persists. 

(4) What is this general notion? It may be wise, before 
attempting to answer that question, to begin by saying 
what it is not. When we use the words community or 
society, there is no suggestion, such as tends to be con¬ 
veyed by words like Volk or nazione or nation, of par¬ 
ticular color and of consequent exclusion or partiality. In 
itself, and in its intrinsic connotation, the idea of com¬ 
munity is not colored by any peculiar reference to race 
or soil or language. 

It is true that any actual community, because it is com¬ 
posed of men, and therefore of physical human bodies, 
will tend to have common physical characteristics which 
may be roughly and crudely designated as racial. But the 
face of the earth is old; it has been swept over, again and 
again, by successions of different men, who have all left 
their traces and their blood; and if a community actually 
shows common physical characteristics, they will be the 
characteristics not of a race but of an amalgam of races. 
Moreover, common physical characteristics, however com¬ 
mon they may be and however generally diffused, have no 
great bearing on the character and nature of a community 
unless they are accompanied by common mental and moral 
qualities; and there is no proof that common physical 
characteristics — in themselves, and apart from other 
causes — produce common mental and moral qualities. 
Nor can it even be admitted that every human community 
has common physical characteristics. The British Com- 


28 


Church and Community 


monwealth is a community, and India is a community 
within that community, but both the one and the other are 
diversified by differences of physical characteristics, and the 
differences within the former grow as new physical types 
(for instance the Australian) develop themselves under 
the influence of a new climate and a new soil. 

A common soil is no doubt necessary to any community; 
and the character of its common soil will no doubt affect, 
as indeed has just been suggested, the community which 
lives on the soil. But when we speak of a common soil, 
we may easily fall into errors and exaggerations. Different 
parts of the soil may well be very different; and in that 
case what is common in the common soil is not the soil 
itself, but our feeling about the soil. In any case there is 
no predestined harmony between soil and community. 
The soil is the environment of the community: that en¬ 
vironment acts upon the community, and the community 
in turn reacts upon the environment: some modus vivendi, 
and some measure of harmony, is attained by the ac¬ 
tion and reaction; but this modus vivendi has to be at¬ 
tained, and can be attained, by any community in any 
environment. 

Even a common language, though it is valuable, and 
indeed particularly valuable, is not an indispensable 
necessity of the life of a community. Not to speak of the 
Swiss community, there are communities in the British 
Commonwealth, such as the Dominion of Canada and the 
Union of South Africa, which are nonetheless communities 
though they are divided in language. Linguistic differ¬ 
ences may possibly create additional difficulties; they cer¬ 
tainly make additional demands on the spirit of mutual 
understanding and mutual comprehension; but far from 
making that spirit impossible, they may even encourage its 
exercise. 


Ernest Barker 


29 

We must recognize that community has roots in the 
physical or quasi-physical — in some peculiar amalgam of 
“ racial ” ingredients; in a common soil, which may none¬ 
theless be various and diversified; in a common mode of 
utterance, which may yet be consistent with varieties — 
but when we have recognized that fact, we have to disen¬ 
gage community itself from its physical or quasi-physical 
bases. These things, or some of them (they are not all 
always present), may be, in the language of Aristotle, 
“ necessary preliminary conditions,” but they are not “ in¬ 
tegral parts.” Just as we have to distinguish community 
from the legal association of the state, which is erected 
upon it, so we have to distinguish it again from the natural 
basis of stock and soil and language, on which it is itself 
erected. The old idea of the social contract has gone out 
of fashion before the advance of historical and scientific 
studies. It was indeed an imperfect and confused idea. It 
supposed natural men to be furnished with the legal wis¬ 
dom and the professional caution of solicitors, and made 
them con and perpend a contract of partnership “ in the 
woods.” It confused community or society with the state, 
and it made them both spring into existence together by 
a single act of immediate creation. But behind its confu¬ 
sions there lay a kernel of truth. Those who held the idea 
were aware of the fact that a community of men is some¬ 
how, and in some sense, a human creation, superimposed 
on the natural or physical grounds of human existence. 

(5) A community involves communication or sharing. 
Sharing, in turn, involves two ideas — the idea of a some¬ 
thing in which you share, and the idea of a number or 
body of persons with whom you share. Of these two ideas 
the more important and the more fundamental is the idea 
of the something in which you share. That is the prior 
idea, in the sense that it tends to determine the number of 


Church and Community 


30 

persons who share. The number who can share with you 
in something must obviously depend in the main on the na¬ 
ture of that in which they are invited to share. But this 
is not the only factor. The area of a community, or the 
number of its members, will also depend on the physical 
possibilities of communication. It will depend, in other 
words, on the range of physical and mental communica¬ 
tions — on the ease or difficulty of physical transport and 
actual personal intercourse; on the ease or difficulty of 
what may be called mental transport, which enables us to 
communicate with one another, without actual personal 
intercourse, through written or printed or photographed 
material presented to our eyes or broadcast matter pre¬ 
sented to our ears. One of the difficulties of our times is 
that communities formed in one stage of physical and men¬ 
tal communications persist in a different stage. No doubt 
they will continue to persist. They have had a long exist¬ 
ence in their own appropriate stage, and they have devel¬ 
oped, in the course of that long existence, a general tradi¬ 
tion and individuality. If the past did not exist and we 
were free to make our own community today, in the light 
of our present methods of communication, we might make 
a world community. If steamships and wireless communi¬ 
cation had existed at the time of the War of American In¬ 
dependence, probably the North American colonies would 
never have seceded from their mother country. But they 
did secede: the past does exist; and it cannot be liquidated. 
Our actual communities are a legacy of the past, be¬ 
queathed to a different present, but inevitable in the pres¬ 
ent to which they have been bequeathed. We must accept 
the legacies of history. . . . But we need not deify them. 

What is the something which has led men, in order that 
they might share in it, to live together in a community — 
a community with an area of membership determined 


Ernest Barker 


3i 

partly by the nature of the thing to be shared, and partly 
by the range of men’s power of communicating with one 
another? To ask this question is not to inquire into the 
purpose or end of the state (that is another matter); it 
is only to inquire into the common substance — the shared 
and common treasure — of community or society. We can 
only say, if we make this inquiry, that there is no limit 
set to this common substance. Community, or society, 
does not mean a sharing with others in some one particu¬ 
lar substance, some one particular good or commodity or 
benefit. Men may share in blood, and be a race, without 
being a community. They may share in language, and 
be a linguistic group, without being a community. They 
may even share in a common system of law and govern¬ 
ment, and be a state, without being a community. The 
old Austro-Hungarian empire was a state, but it was not 
a community. In order that there may be a community 
there must be conscious and purposive sharing (it is in this 
sense that a community of men is necessarily a human 
creation); and the sharing must be a sharing in the general 
business of life and in its general conduct. 

(6) Two things are here predicated of community. 
The first is that it involves a conscious and purposive shar¬ 
ing. This is what Burke meant when he wrote that 
“ society is indeed a contract,” or, in other words, a partner¬ 
ship. However it may need, and however it may be con¬ 
nected with, “ necessary preliminary conditions ” of a 
natural or physical order — a natural sense of kinship, or 
a natural contiguity in space — it yet transcends these con¬ 
ditions, and is superimposed upon them by a purpose of 
further and higher communication. The second thing pre¬ 
dicated is that community involves a sharing in a general 
way of life. This, again, is what Burke meant when he 
said that “ it is not a partnership in things subservient only 


Church and Community 


32 

to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perish¬ 
able nature; it is a partnership in all science, a partnership 
in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfec¬ 
tion/’ 4 Whatever the mind of men can reach — in the 
way of common and mutual fulfilment of moral obliga¬ 
tion; in the common practice of religion; in the common 
furtherance of science and art in their widest sense; in the 
common advancement of economic prosperity and the com¬ 
mon upholding of economic standards — this is the affair 
of community, so long as this is done by voluntary and 
spontaneous effort, in the spirit of free partnership. Who¬ 
ever can join in this, whatever his blood or speech, is a 
member of society and a partner in community. 

In the great passage from Burke which has just been 
quoted community, or society, is still identified with the 
state. Burke begins by speaking of “ society ”; he glides, 
in the very next sentence, into speech of the “ state,” as if 
the two terms were synonymous. 5 A passage from a con¬ 
temporary writer, Professor George Unwin, may illustrate 
the difference of the two terms, as we interpret them in 
England today: 

I mean by the state that one of our social cohesions which has 
drawn to itself the exercise of final authority, and which can 
support that authority, if need be, by the exercise of physical 
force. And I mean by society all the rest of our social cohe¬ 
sions — family, trade union, church, and the rest. . . . Primi¬ 
tive man was restricted to a single social cohesion, which con¬ 
trolled him with supreme authority. Life was impossible 
outside his tribe. Freedom was impossible within it. The 
great array of differentiated social cohesions, which represent 

4 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, IV, 105-6, of the edi¬ 
tion in the World’s Classics, Oxford. 

s “Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of 
mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure — but the State ought 
not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement ” 
(ibid .). 


Ernest Barker 


33 

in their totality the free society of modern civilization, and 
from which the authority and force embodied in the state have 
withdrawn themselves, furnish the individual with that great 
variety of choice which constitutes real freedom. 6 

The conception of community which is here implied 
has had a long history in our country. It may not have 
been explicit even in the days of Burke. But it had been 
implicit long before. If we go back to the Middle Ages, 
we find that our English law — the very law which seems 
the special and peculiar province of the state — was being 
built, in no small measure, by independent communities 
of lawyers, the Inns of Court, from which the judges were 
drawn, and which stood behind the judges. The Tudor 
age of the sixteenth century was in some ways a setback 
(as ages of “ unification ” are, whatever benefit they may 
bring) : it was an age of one commonwealth, one state, 
one church, and everything unified. But the seventeenth 
century marks a new advance of free community action. 
The debt which we owe to our “ Free churches,” and to 
the general movement of nonconformity, from the seven¬ 
teenth century onwards, is incalculable. They were the 
beginning of a new advance; but that advance also showed 
itself, and showed itself increasingly, in a number of other 
ways. The movement of English colonization was a move¬ 
ment of the community. “ The expansion of England in 
the seventeenth century was an expansion of society and 
not of the state.” 7 When England awoke to new life, in 
the latter half of the eighteenth century, the new life ex- 

6 G. Unwin, Studies in Economic History, p. 459. In another passage 
(p. 28) he distinguishes between society as the set of forces from below — 
the forces of spontaneity, of germination — and the state as the set of forces 
from above — the forces of authority, of formulation. He adds that, in his 
view, “ the main feature of British history has been the remolding of a state 
by a powerful society; the main feature of German history in the same pe¬ 
riod has been the remolding of a society by a powerful state.” 

7 Ibid., p. 341. 


Church and Community 


34 

pressed itself in the form, not of political revolution, but 
of religious and philanthropic movements in the general 
community. When at last Parliament was reformed and 
the reformed Parliament began to stir itself, in the course 
of the nineteenth century, it did not seek to oust the action 
of the community in order to install the action of the state. 
Our nineteenth century method (and it is still our method 
in the twentieth) was that of cooperation between a demo¬ 
cratic state and a free community. “It is a feature of 
the typical nineteenth century development,” Mr. Sidney 
Webb wrote in 1910, “that voluntary association and 
government action have always gone on side by side, the 
one apparently always inspiring, facilitating, and procur¬ 
ing successive developments of the other.” 8 

(7) We may now draw together some of the conclusions 
which are implied in the course of the argument. 

(a) A community or society, taken as a whole, is a body 
of persons sharing with one another in the common sub¬ 
stance of a general civilization, which is not limited to 
any particular activity. Viewed in regard to the substance 
in which it shares, a community is inclusive, total, we may 
even say totalitarian. But that word totalitarian may give 
us pause, and we must remember the qualifications to 
which its use is subject. In the first place it is the com¬ 
munity and not the state which is total. The state is 
limited by its legal character and confined to the one com¬ 
mon substance of declared and enforced law. In the second 
place, the community itself is not totalitarian in the sense 
that it acts as a single whole when it seeks to cover the 
whole of life. A community is itself a sum of interacting 
and complementary communities. It acts in and through 
the communities which it contains; and it is only total in so 
far as it contains sufficient riches of community organiza- 
s Cambridge Modern History, XII, 747. 


Ernest Barker 35 

tion to correspond to the different aspects of human life 
and to enable men to share in all the different ways in 
which sharing is possible. A community without any 
church could not be a total community. A community in 
which family life was abrogated or truncated could not be 
a total community. A community in which there was no 
room and no place for trade unions would not be a total 
community. 

(b) It follows that a community is federal in character. 
It is not a federation, since it is not a union of states; but 
we may understand its nature by the analogy of a federa¬ 
tion. It is “ a great array of differentiated social cohe¬ 
sions ” — religious, economic, social, charitable, educa¬ 
tional, artistic, and scientific — which unite and cooperate 
to form the total social cohesion. Not that the units which 
form a community ever club together, by any sort of fed¬ 
eral act, to bring it into being. Such an idea would be 
absurd, though there are some forms of theory (of the 
“ pluralist ” or “ functionalist ” or “ syndicalistic ” order) 
which seem to look in that direction. On the contrary, 
the community is prior to its contained communities; and 
they develop or differentiate themselves within it as it seeks 
to attain a greater fullness. Yet there is also a sense in 
which we may say that the germination of new forms of so¬ 
cial cohesion helps to form a community, or at any rate so 
broadens and enriches it that it becomes conscious of what 
it is and of the common substance in which it shares. It 
has often been pointed out, for example, that the conver¬ 
sion of Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity, and the for¬ 
mation of a Christian community in England, helped to 
create a general or national community. 

There is no single formula in which we can comprehend 
the relation of the growing contained communities to the 
growth of the whole community, or the relation of the 


Church and Community 


36 

general grown community to its various contained com¬ 
munities. Sometimes the contained communities may 
even seem not to be contained at all. A branch of the 
Roman Catholic Church contained within any given 
general community is also contained within that church at 
large; and it may be drawn so much to the one that it almost 
escapes the other. Yet it may perhaps be asserted that 
generally, and upon the whole, each community contains, 
or at any rate colors, all the different social cohesions in its 
area — whether they have germinated within it or have 
been introduced into it; whether they exist solely within 
it or ramify outside it. On the one hand they build it up, 
like a branching coral reef; on the other hand, it draws 
them together, without any violence and without any force, 
in the terms of a common life. There is a sense in which 
the English family, the English trade unions, and the Eng¬ 
lish churches, all correspond, and all answer one another. 

(c) The general community, with all its contained com¬ 
munities, employs no force. That is not to say that it does 
not exert influence, or even employ a discipline, upon its 
members. But at its utmost range it is pedagogic rather 
than legal; it is a school rather than a state. It is a free 
partnership of minds, for the exploration of all the fields 
of the mind; and it always retains the note of freedom, 
initiative, experimentation. We may alter the metaphor 
of the school, or rather we may carry it further; we may 
speak of the laboratory. This is a metaphor which has 
been employed even by an apostle of the state — Professor 
Bosanquet. He admits — indeed he contends — that 

the content of legislation and administration with a view to 
the public good — the inventive, experimental, creative ele¬ 
ment — is almost entirely supplied by one or other of the forms 
of social action which are not due to the initiative of the state. 
. . . True social work, independent of the public power, is 


Ernest Barker 


37 

the laboratory of social invention. . . . The work of the state 
is de facto, for the most part, “ endorsement ” or “ taking over ” 
— setting its imprimatur, the seal of its force, on what more 
flexible activities or the mere progress of life have wrought out 
in long years of adventurous experiment or silent growth. 9 

The community is thus a laboratory for the state. But 
that is not all. The community is also a laboratory for 
itself. It may hand over some of its inventions to be “ en¬ 
dorsed.’* But there is much that need not be endorsed, 
and cannot be endorsed. There are things we can dis¬ 
cover for ourselves and do for ourselves in the field of com¬ 
munity life which had better remain in that field, and 
indeed must remain in that field. The partnership in 
science and art, “ all virtue and every perfection,” must 
again and again run into the form of law; but it must 
equally, and even more, remain at point after point in its 
own fluid form — for otherwise science and art and virtue 
and perfection will be petrified in the form of compulsion. 

There is also another sense in which the community, 
if it be regarded as a community of communities, is the 
home of freedom and experimentation and choice. The 
free community permits us all to make our choice among 
its riches. We can choose, enter, and relinquish the soci¬ 
eties which it contains. No doubt they, too, like the whole 
community itself, exert an influence and even employ a 
discipline upon us, so long as zve are members. But even 
so, as Professor Unwin has argued, “ they are not a mere 
instrument of social pressure ” on the individual. “ He 
can react through them upon society, and this reaction of 
a strong and clear will upon society is freedom. But this 
is only possible on condition that he freely selects his social 
cohesions.” 10 A community in which each man has this 

a Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State, Introduction to the sec¬ 
ond edition, pp. xxxii-xxxiii. 10 G. Unwin, op. cit., p. 459. 


Church and Community 


38 

capacity of free selection — among parties, churches, pro¬ 
fessional and occupational societies, and all forms of volun¬ 
tary grouping — is a laboratory not only for general social 
experiment, but also for the testing and trying out of in¬ 
dividual character and personality. 

(d) It follows that the community is in no sense a tran¬ 
scendent being which stands above the individual and 
determines his being and his duties in terms of its own 
higher nature. It is true enough that the long course of 
social experiment has resulted in a tradition of social ex¬ 
perience; that this tradition of social experience elevates 
every individual, in a greater or less degree, according to 
his capacity for entering into its inheritance; that a great 
part of the content of every individual mind is a social con¬ 
tent; and that membership of any community involves a 
long process of education in the tradition of the commu¬ 
nity. But we cannot leap from this simple truth to the 
very different assumption that there is some higher being 
in the music of which all individuals are merely so many 
stops — “ an organism with ends, a being and means of 
action superior, in power and duration, to those of the in¬ 
dividuals, separate or grouped, who compose it.” 11 A 
common content of many minds does not involve a com¬ 
mon mind — at any rate when we are thinking sub specie 
humanitatis and dealing with the sphere of our transitory 
human groups. (The conception of a church in which 
there is an indwelling Spirit of God belongs to a different 
plane of thought. But we only confuse thought, with sad 
and tragic results, when we take what belongs to one plane 
and transfer it to another and different plane. “ I only 
am holy, saith the Lord.”) A human community is its 
own members, and no more than its own members (though 

11 Article I of the Carta del Lavoro, approved and promulgated by the 
Fascist Grand Council of Italy, April 21, 1927. 


Ernest Barker 


39 

it is more than its present members, since its past members, 
who are now gone, still live on in any element of its tra¬ 
dition which they have bequeathed, and its future mem¬ 
bers, who are still to come, already belong to it, in the sense 
that it owes a duty to them and to their well-being); it sim¬ 
ply consists in the intercourse of those members, their rela¬ 
tions to one another, their sharing with one another, and 
the common ideas and ideals which they have constructed 
and in which they share. This is its essence. And if it has 
some natural or physical basis — some “ touch of nature ” 
and consciousness of kin; some clinging to mother earth 
and some sense of the common soil — this is not of that 
essence, though it may be a primitive stuff which enabled 
the essence to emerge and grow. A community is some¬ 
thing different from its own basis, and something above its 
necessary preliminary conditions. But it is also something 
less than a transcendent and superior being or mind, which 
stands above its members. It is just itself — a free partner¬ 
ship of individual minds, with its roots embedded in na¬ 
ture, but with its branches spread in the common air and 
the common light of the human spirit. 

2. CHURCH 

(1) In what has been already said the relation of church 
to community has already been, at any rate by implication, 
suggested or foreshadowed . 12 A church (or a number of 

12 The reader will have observed that the argument of the writer pro¬ 
ceeds from a general conception of the development and nature of commu¬ 
nity, and then attempts to relate the idea and practice of the church to this 
conception. In an admirable and profound commentary on the paper, Dr. 
Hofer, of Leipzig, proposes an opposite procedure. Community, he sug¬ 
gests, in all its dimensions and manifestations belongs merely to history, to 
time, to the stream of “ becoming.” We must start from the church and 
from the nature and aim of the church; and on that basis we must adopt 
an attitude and express our demands in regard to the various concrete 
manifestations of community, which differ from country to country and 


Church and Community 


40 

churches) is part of the federal nature of community. In 
many respects it is parallel with, and analogous to, other 
parts. Some of its objects may be similar to the objects of 
other parts, and they may even overlap with them; the edu¬ 
cational objects of a church, for example, are similar to 
those of a specifically educational society, and they have 
some affinity even with those of a trade union which makes 
the advancement of education among its members one of 
its aims. In formal organization, again, a church may be 
closely analogous to other societies within the community; 


from age to age. These manifestations belong to the passing aeon of 
Adam: the church, entirely different in nature, belongs to the new aeon of 
fulfilment in Christ. The age in which we live is still the age of an inter¬ 
vening period (die Zwischenzeit ), in which the two aeons meet and struggle 
with one another, and in which the church of the new aeon is confronted by 
the alien dimensions, manifestations and institutions of the old. 

This line of thought may be called Augustinian, and it obviously di¬ 
verges, with a wide divergence, from the tendency to Pelagianism which is 
sometimes said to be characteristic of English thought. The writer is very 
far from wishing to offer any rejoinder: he would only say that he has read 
Dr. Hofer’s commentary with a deep and sympathetic attention. There is 
a difference between our two countries which demands earnest study on 
both sides. Dr. Hofer remarks, at the end of his commentary, that German 
history, both on its religious and on its secular side, has followed a totally 
different course from English. “ Today,” he writes, “ England and Ger¬ 
many are not ‘ contemporary ’ and their positions are not analogous: the 
two countries and peoples are not in similar stages of history. This judg¬ 
ment is not a judgment of value, but simply a fact." 

One further remark on Dr. Hofer’s commentary may perhaps be made. 
He expresses his agreement with the writer’s contention (at the end of the 
first and in the beginning of the second part of this paper) that a commu¬ 
nity of minds should not be hypostatized into a common mind transcend¬ 
ing (or rather supposed to transcend) individual minds. But he adds 
that “ it is a different question how far super-terrestrial spiritual forces 
may be at work in the world and he refers to St. Paul’s mention of prin¬ 
cipalities, powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world (Eph. 6:12). 
Here again the writer is very far from wishing to offer any rejoinder. He 
only notes that the Gemeingeist reappears as something transcendental (if 
transcendentally evil), and that “ this aeon ’’ thus acquires satanic dimen¬ 
sions and manifestations. 



Ernest Barker 


4i 

it may adopt a similar type of internal government; it may 
stand in a similar relation to the government of the state, 
and may occupy a similar position in the eye of the law. 
In England, for example, the “ Free churches ” and the 
trade unions alike vest their property in trustees, under a 
trust deed which binds the trustees to use the property for 
the objects and in the ways which are specified in their 
rules. But it would be dangerous, and very erroneous, to 
press these analogies too far. A church, partly in virtue of 
the past history of its life, but above all in virtue of its own 
permanent and peculiar nature, stands in a special relation 
to the community. It has also stood, and in some countries 
still stands, in a peculiar relation to the state. These are 
two different matters; but they cannot be entirely disen¬ 
tangled or dissociated. 

Before we look at the history of the relation of the 
church to the community, which has taken different forms 
at different times, there is one word to be said, of the first 
importance, in regard to the nature of the church. The 
Christian church is the custodian of a sacred Scripture, or 
revealed Word, which its members are bound to obey as 
the ultimate standard of authority in all matters which it 
covers, and which they are bound to proclaim, not only to 
the other members (if there be other members who are not 
Christians) of the community in which they are set, but 
also to members of other communities all over the world, 
so far as they are still ignorant of the Word. A Christian 
church is sui generis in its custody of the Word of God, and 
in the duty of mission — universal mission — incumbent 
upon it under the Word. One form of church may differ 
from another in its interpretation of the Word; but all 
forms are agreed in their basic idea of a custody of the 
Word and of a mission imposed by that custody. 

But the Christian conception of a church goes farther 


Church and Community 


42 

than this. God has not simply left a Word in custody with 
a church, which is thereby made unique, in virtue of the 
unique character of its common substance, among all other 
forms or varieties of community. He himself remains in 
the church, and his Spirit dwells perennially in its mem¬ 
bers. In the community of the church, there is a Being 
which transcends the members, and yet is immanent in 
them. Here we may speak of an organism, as St. Paul did; 
for here we have “ the head, even Christ, from whom the 
whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that 
which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual 
working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of 
the body unto the edifying of itself in love.” Any organ¬ 
ism has a life purpose which is served by every part and to 
which every part is instrumental. In the economy of God, 
and where he himself is present, there can be a divine and 
eternal life purpose which is served by every member of 
his church and to which every member is instrumental. 
Here, and here only, we can conceive of the soul of man as 
part of an organism, inspired and controlled by the life 
purpose of that organism, but free in the service of that 
purpose by virtue of its own free love. Apart from the 
presence of God, and in any system of human or secular 
economy, man can never be part of an organism, because 
the intrinsic and ultimate value of his personality — an 
end in itself, except before God — forbids him to be in¬ 
strumental. St. Paul could conceive of man as growing 
in Christ — “ in the unity of the faith and of the knowl¬ 
edge of the Son of God ” — “ up into him in all things.” 
He could speak, again, of the Christian life as “ hid with 
Christ in God.” But he could also warn the believer 
against being beguiled by those who intrude into the things 
which they have not seen and are vainly puffed up by their 
fleshly mind, “ not holding the Head, from which the body 


Ernest Barker 


43 

by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and 
knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.” “ Not 
holding the Head,” we cannot see any Being which tran¬ 
scends the members of a community and yet is immanent 
in them; “ not holding the Head,” we cannot rightly speak 
of a community as an organism, in which each part is an 
instrument . 13 

(2) The Christian conception of a church as unique 
among other forms or varieties of community, first in be¬ 
ing the custodian and in being charged with the proclama¬ 
tion of a revealed Word which is the ultimate standard of 
authority in all matters which it covers, and second — and 
even more — in being permeated and made organic by the 
continuing and indwelling presence of a personal God in 
whose service all its members live and have their being — 
this was a conception new to the ancient world in which it 
appeared. The Stoics had some conception of a cosmo¬ 
politan but indefinite society in which all rational men, 
possessing their “ fragment ” of reason, were knit to the 

13 The application to the church of the conception of “ organism ” has 
been criticized by some of the commentators on this paper. An Indian 
group put the question, “ Is even the church better understood when it is 
called an * organism ’ considering the admitted freedom of the parts? ” 
Dr. Hofer, in his commentary, remarks that the conception of organism 
can only be applied to the church with caution and cum grano salis: “ The 
Christian is first called as an individual, a personality, and then incorpo¬ 
rated in Christ, and it is only to that extent and thereby that he is incor¬ 
porated in the body of Christ, the church.” The writer would at once ad¬ 
mit, and even contend, that the metaphor of organism is still a metaphor, 
even when it is applied to the church, and that there is at most similarity 
— similarity over a wide area, but not a total identity — between the con¬ 
ception of organism and the conception of the church. His main argument 
is that if the word “organism” is used at all in reference to any group 
composed of human beings, it can best be applied to the church, because 
the church has a head as well as members, and because it has a single life 
purpose which every member must serve. But comparisons of a spiritual 
society to a physical system must always remain, at the best, approxima¬ 
tions to truth. 


Church and Community 


44 

impersonal reason of God (physically conceived as a sort 
of fiery ether); but that was a very different thing. An 
impersonal God, who was fundamentally a fine and tenu¬ 
ous physical substance, could only constitute an equally 
impersonal society, united (if indeed it could be called 
united) by a common physical sharing in the common 
physical substance of a mere fiery ether. What confronted 
the Christian church and challenged the Christian church 
was not the wraith of the Stoic cosmopolis, but the gigantic 
and visible fact of a universal empire united by the cement 
of a common worship of the emperor. This empire made 
no distinction, and allowed no distinction, between com¬ 
munity and state — between the free partnership sharing 
in a common substance of civilization, and the legal asso¬ 
ciation sharing in a common body of law intended to pro¬ 
tect that substance. State and community were one in the 
Roman Empire, as they had been one in the Greek city- 
state. Everything hung on the one integrated body: reli¬ 
gion was merely one of its departments: the conduct of 
worship was a legal duty of legal officials, and worship itself 
was a civic obligation. 14 When the Christian conception 
and practice of the church emerged, a profound question 
— perhaps the profoundest in history — thus arose. What 
was to be the relation of this conception and practice of 
the church to the community-state or state-community — 
the integrated body which was both these things in one? 

It was not a possible answer to this question that the 
idea of community should be disengaged from that of the 
state, and that the church should take its place in commu¬ 
nity as a part of its federal system and a vanguard and a 
leader in the play of its federal life. That might eventu- 

14 This is not to say that private worship, and private societies for its 
conduct, might not be added — subject to the state’s consent — to the basic 
obligation of public worship. 


Ernest Barker 


45 

ally be what the church would do, and that might be its 
inward and ultimate trend; but many centuries were to 
elapse before that trend could become evident and before 
the church could attempt to take that place and act that 
part. In the conditions of the fourth century, when the 
church made its peace with the old system, it could not be¬ 
come a part of community; there was no real community 
there of which it could become a part. Neither could it 
constitute itself as another world — a whole other world 
— over against the existing world of the community-state. 
That would have been an impossible dualism. What 
could be done and what was done, was that the church 
should, formally, permeate and Christianize the existing 
world of the community-state and make it a single inte¬ 
grated community-state-and-church. In other words, the 
universal empire could, and did, become also, and at the 
same time, a universal or catholic church. One body of 
men had henceforth two aspects: in one aspect it was a 
community-state, and in the other it was a church. Or we 
may say, more exactly, that the community-state, becoming 
a community-state-and-church, had henceforth two govern¬ 
ments — a secular government in things temporal, and an 
ecclesiastical government in things spiritual. This was the 
way in which the matter was put by Gelasius I about 500 
a.d., when he enunciated the theory of a dyarchy of two 
authorities, and of the parity of the two. 

(3) Identified with the community-state, the church, 
in its outward form, ceased to be a pure body bearing the 
custody of the Word and knit organically to its Head; it 
became the alter ego of another body, subject to the for¬ 
tunes and the historic vicissitudes of that other body. As 
the community-state altered, contracted, split and showed 
fissures (by a sort of process analogous, in its way, to geo¬ 
logical change), the outward form of the church was cor- 


Church and Community 


46 

respondingly affected. Not that its own inner life, or the 
Word by which it was inspired, or the movement of its 
guiding Spirit, were ever for a moment inactive or ever 
without effect in determining its outward form and order. 
The church was never merely passive; but it is nonetheless 
true that, once identified with the community-state and 
made coterminous with it, it was necessarily affected by the 
changes and contingencies of the life of that body. 

First the community-state bifurcated: it developed an 
Eastern or Byzantine manifestation as well as a Western 
or Roman; and there arose an Eastern or Orthodox 
Church as well as a Western or Catholic. Then, many 
centuries later, in the era of the Reformation, there came 
another historical fissure, and Protestantism emerged. 
This was partly produced by the working of the Word and 
the Spirit (we should be blind if we did not see that work¬ 
ing) ; but it was also produced, in part, by a change of the 
community-state, and there is thus a sense in which we 
may say that once more the church, in its outward form, 
“ bent with the remover to remove.” The general designa¬ 
tion of Protestantism cannot conceal the fact of a plurality 
of Protestant churches; and when we study this plurality, 
we have to remember not only the different doctrines (or 
different interpretations of the Word) on which it was 
based, but also the emergence of a new and plural concep¬ 
tion and practice of the community-state. 

The two things are tangled and intertwined; but follow¬ 
ing the thread of our argument we may concentrate our 
attention on the way in which the outward form of the 
church was affected by the change of the community-state 
in western and northern Europe. Here there had emerged 
what we cannot yet generally call by the name of the “ na¬ 
tion ” (though in some places it might be such), but what 
we may safely call by the more indeterminate name of the 


Ernest Barker 


47 

“ region.” Each region — whether it was a kingdom, or, 
as in Germany and Switzerland, a principality or a canton 
— was already acting as an autonomous community-state. 
If a region seceded from Rome, and adopted the principle 
of a Reformed church, it assumed that this church, in its 
outward form, must be identified and coterminous with 
itself. The old idea of the community-state-and-church 
persisted; it only assumed a new and more particular form. 
Hooker states this new form when he writes that “in a 
. . . Christian state or kingdom . . . one and the self¬ 
same people are the church and the commonwealth.” In 
other words, three things are the same: a “ people,” or 
community, is also a commonwealth or state, and it is also 
a church. What was held by the Anglican Hooker was held 
also by Lutherans and Calvinists. It was the common — 
we might almost say the inevitable — belief of the six¬ 
teenth century. And it was inevitable because it was noth¬ 
ing new, but simply the accepted inheritance of the past, 
applied — and logically applied — to the new conditions 
of the present. 

(4) How was this identification of community, state and 
church to be ended? How was community to be separated 
from state, and how was the church to find its place and its 
peace in the free partnership of community? The seed of 
the answer had always been present in the church, and it 
was to germinate from the church. The church, as a so¬ 
ciety of the Word and a community in the Spirit, had al¬ 
ways been in its essence distinct from the community-state 
with which, in its outward form, it had so long been identi¬ 
fied. If it began to thrust upwards again, in its own nature, 
it would not only distinguish itself from the community- 
state; it would also help to distinguish the community 
from the state; it would form a nucleus of free commu¬ 
nity which would encourage the general growth of such 


Church and Community 


48 

community. Men have often distinguished between the 
church invisible and the church visible, or the church uni¬ 
versal and the particular church. Perhaps more important 
is the distinction between the church as a society of the 
Word and a community in the Spirit, and the church as 
coterminous and identified, in its outward form, with the 
range of the community-state. After the sixteenth century 
that distinction (never forgotten, but never developed) be¬ 
gan to assume new life, with consequential effects on the 
community-state itself. 

On the one hand the reformed Catholic Church of the 
counter-Reformation began to stand out distinct, not only 
from the new Protestant churches, but also from the com¬ 
munity-state. In the new order, or the new disorder, there 
was no community-state broad enough to be coterminous 
with its range. In the theory of Suarez the church, as a 
communitas politica vel mystica of divine foundation, is 
distinguished from the communities of human invention, 
however “ perfect ” (in the sense of having full capacity of 
political government) these may be; and it is interesting 
also to notice that his category of “ perfect communities of 
human invention ” includes not only the state, but also 
local communities, and even personal groups. 

On the other hand the Protestant area of Europe began 
also to develop, in the course of the seventeenth century 
(though the movement was already beginning in the 
sixteenth), the idea of the separate communitas of the 
church. The regional — or, as it may perhaps better be 
called, the “ territorial ” — principle began to be chal¬ 
lenged by what has been called the “ collegial.” The “ col¬ 
legial ” principle appeared among the Calvinists; it may 
already be traced in the sixteenth century; 15 but it is defi- 

15 See the University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. I, No. 1 (Oct. 1931), 
article on “ The Problem of Spiritual Authority in England,” especially 
PP- 33 - 37 - 


Ernest Barker 


49 

nitely enunciated by the Dutch Calvinist, Voetius, in the 
seventeenth, when he argues that the church is based on 
its own contract of society, independent of the political, 
and is therefore a “ collegial ” or corporate body with its 
own free membership and its own power over its own 
body. This is a doctrine like, and yet unlike, that of 
Andrew Melville, when he proclaimed to James VI of 
Scotland, in 1596, his theory of the two kings and the 
two kingdoms in Scotland. Melville was anxious to vindi¬ 
cate the claims of the custodians and governors of the 
spiritual kingdom against those of the earthly king; but 
he still held that the two kingdoms were coterminous — 
or, in other words, that every subject of the Scottish king 
should also belong to the Presbyterian Church. Voetius 
goes further, and his collegial church is of a different 
pattern from Melville’s spiritual kingdom. But it is not 
so much in Calvinism (even of the type of Voetius) as in 
the English Independents of the seventeenth century, and 
in English nonconformity generally, that the doctrine of 
the collegial church sinks deep and becomes the one 
foundation. The Free churches were firmly grounded as 
societies of the Word and communities in the Spirit, dis¬ 
tinct from the community-state. So grounded, they not 
only rooted themselves, apart from and outside the “ in¬ 
tegral ” community-state: they also served as the nucleus of 
a further growth of free community; and they thus helped, 
as we have already had reason to notice, to disengage state 
and community and to foster the general growth of com¬ 
munity (with themselves as part of it) in English thought 
and practice. 

We must not overemphasize the part played by the 
Christian churches during the course of modern history 
in disengaging state and community. Other forces have 
also been at work; there has been, for example, the eco¬ 
nomic, from the voluntary companies which colonized in 


Church and Community 


50 

the seventeenth century to the trade unions of the nine¬ 
teenth. Nor must we exaggerate the extent to which com¬ 
munity has been actually disengaged from state. The 
French Revolution was a triumph, or a return, of the in¬ 
tegrated community-state, anxious to absorb the church 
and to make itself the one and only common ordering 
of human life. Today, again, in some European countries, 
the same triumph is being celebrated, with an even greater 
zeal. Under such conditions there may arise curious 
Erastianisms — or even, if we may use the word, Diocle- 
tianisms. Nonetheless, we may say today — speaking of 
ourselves in England, and speaking of the matter as we 
see it with our own eyes — that the community is some¬ 
thing which may be distinguished from the state; that the 
churches have helped to make it distinct; that the churches 
belong to the essence of community; but that they belong 
to it in a particular way, which depends on their own 
particular character. 

(5) A church, as we have said, is a part of the federal 
nature of community. 16 But, as we have also said, it is a 

10 A number of questions were raised by an Indian group in regard to 
the content of the argument of this section. The argument deals with the 
relation of church to community in the various forms, or areas, of commu¬ 
nity within the British Commonwealth. One question raised was whether 
some consideration should not have been given to the conception of the 
church universal, and its relation both to the conception of a universal 
community and to that of the particular or local community. Such con¬ 
sideration might well have been given; but the immediate problem to 
which the writer was directing his attention was that of the relation of 
particular churches (and mainly the Protestant churches) to the particu¬ 
lar or local communities with which they are necessarily connected. . . . 
Other questions which were raised dealt with the special problems of India. 
What was to be the relation of the Indian church, as such, to the Indian 
Christian community as organized in an electorate for the purposes of par¬ 
liamentary representation? Should there be a political party based on the 
church, or should members of the church take their place in other parties 
and seek to leaven those parties? The writer can only say that the argu¬ 
ment of his paper would incline to the second alternative. Again the 


Ernest Barker 


5i 

part which is sui generis: it is a custodian of the Word, 
according to its own interpretation; and it has a mission 
imposed by the Word of which it is a custodian. This 
conception of mission will carry a church, in foreign mis¬ 
sionary enterprise, outside the limits of the community 
in which it is set. But the cardinal question, when we 
are considering the relations of church and community, is 
the question of the mission of the church to its own im¬ 
mediate community. 

Let us suppose that community to be (as it generally is) 
a nation — a single nation — a nation which lives and 
builds a general national tradition behind and beyond the 
legal association of the state, though if the state be a na¬ 
tional state (as again it generally is) there will be sym¬ 
pathy and cooperation between the nation as such and the 
legal association as such. Upon this basis a church, with 
its mission to the nation and with its duty of testimony to 
the nation, may be impelled to draw its adherents from 
the whole of the nation, and to draw the whole of the 
nation into itself. It is in this sense that the Presbyterian 
Church of Scotland seeks to be a “ national church, repre¬ 
sentative of the Christian faith of the Scottish people,” 
with “ a call and duty to bring the ordinances of religion 
to the people in every parish of Scotland.” The church 
thus widens itself to the width of the whole community; 
and in one sense it is the community. In another sense it 
is just a part, or an aspect, or a function of the community 
— an aspect accompanied by other aspects, a part cooperat¬ 
ing with other parts (economic, for instance, or educa- 

question was raised whether the Indian church could make its peace with 
other societies, and cooperate with them as parts (similar to itself) in the 
general federal system of society, or whether it must break (and ask its 
members to break) with other societies. That is too grave a question for 
the writer to answer, though he would naturally wish, if it were possible, to 
see the first alternative followed. 



Church and Community 


52 

tional) which, though less extensive in their range of 
membership or the scope of their general endeavor, still 
have their own place and their own function in constitut¬ 
ing the general community. 17 

That is one possibility. Still confining ourselves to the 
relation of church and community, and still leaving the 
state out of account, we can also see other possibilities. 
The different Free churches in England help to constitute 
the English community, but none of them seeks to em¬ 
brace the whole of it: each of them recruits its own circle 
of members; all of them acknowledge and respect one 
another’s boundaries; and each and all can cooperate, 
through a federal council of the Free churches, to defend 
and maintain, before the community and for the benefit of 
the community, the common principles on which, in spite 
of their differences, they are all alike based. By their side 
stands the Church of England. Its relation to the English 
community is far from simple. In one sense it seeks, like 
the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, to be a national 
church, embracing the whole community and bringing 
the ordinances of religion to the people of England in 
every parish. In another sense, less formal and more 
real, it is content, like the Free churches in England, to re¬ 
cruit its own particular circle of adherents; and like them 
it helps to constitute the English community without 
claiming (otherwise than in form) to cover the whole of it. 
In still a third sense — when we take the state into account 
as well as the community — the Church of England has a 
peculiar relation to the state. It is “ established ” by it — 

17 it should be added that the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, broad 
as it is, does not of course include the whole of the Scottish people. Be¬ 
sides the Roman Catholic Church there are also, in the general field of 
Protestantism, (1) independent Presbyterian bodies; (2) Free churches of 
the English type; and (3) an Episcopal Church allied to, but independent 
of, the Church of England. 


Ernest Barker 


53 

that is to say, it is given certain legal rights and subjected 
to certain legal duties which may be regarded as the corol¬ 
lary of its rights. Here we must notice a peculiar and per¬ 
plexing fact, which can only be explained by the accidents 
of historical development. The Church of England, 
which, as such, and as its name indicates, exists in and for 
the English community, is established by a state (and so 
far as establishment involves control, it is controlled by a 
state) which is not the state of the English community, 
but a state including Scotland and Wales, and also north¬ 
ern Ireland, as well as England. 

The relation of church and community in England is 
peculiar and peculiarly complicated. It is simpler in 
Wales. Here there exist Free churches, as in England; 
and here, since March 31, 1920, there exists what is called 
“the Church in Wales” — a body which is, in a sense, 
a branch of the Church of England, but a body which, 
having been “ disestablished ” since 1920, is separate from 
the established Church of England and governs itself 
autonomously. The general result is that the community 
of Wales, in its relations to the Christian churches, offers 
a simple pattern. Different churches, on the same footing, 
help to constitute the community. None of them seeks 
to embrace or include the whole, in reality or in form; 
each of them brings its contribution to the whole. 

In the course of the analysis of community, in the first 
part of this paper, something was said about the multi¬ 
form and multicolored nature of the British conception 
and practice of community, and about the many concen¬ 
tric areas of operation in which that conception was active. 
Not only do we regard each community as in itself a federa¬ 
tion of groups (religious, educational, economic, and the 
like); we are also prepared to see successive circles of com¬ 
munity — from the circle in which Scotland, England 


Church and Community 


54 

and Wales are communities to the circle in which the 
United Kingdom is a community, and from that circle 
again to the circle in which the whole of the British Com¬ 
monwealth is a community. When we consider this suc¬ 
cession of circles we see that it is an artificial simplification 
of the relation of church and community, so far as we are 
concerned, to discuss that relation only in regard to the 
circle in which Scotland, England and Wales are com¬ 
munities. 

We have also to think of the relation of the Christian 
churches to the community of the United Kingdom. 
Since that community is organized as a state (while the 
Scottish, English, and Welsh communities are not), it is 
in this area that the problem of the relation of church and 
state arises; and it is in this area that, as has just been 
noticed, the peculiarity exists of a church being established 
by the state in only one part of its territory. But the com¬ 
munity of the United Kingdom still remains a community, 
even if it is organized as a state and even if we think of it 
largely as a state. Many of the churches, like most of our 
trade unions, are constituted on the general basis of the 
community of the United Kingdom, and help to constitute 
that community. The Free churches of England, though 
they may have originated in England and though they may 
be particularly represented in England, have flowed over 
the United Kingdom. The Church of England may be 
peculiar to England, but it is also closely associated with 
the Church in Wales and with the Episcopal Church in 
Scotland. 

Nor is the United Kingdom the full limit of the range 
either of the Free churches or of the Church of England. 
We have also to think of the wider circle of the community 
of the Commonwealth. The one connection in which we 
habitually use the dubious prefix “ pan ” is when we speak 


Ernest Barker 


55 

of the Pan-Anglican Synod which gathers together repre¬ 
sentatives from all the Episcopalian churches in the whole 
of the Commonwealth. 18 The Free churches are similarly 
spread. The connection which unites all the Episcopalian 
churches of the Commonwealth, or all the different 
branches of the various Free churches which are spread 
over it, may be loose. But there is a connection; and it is 
a part of the connection and the general constitution of 
the community of the Commonwealth. It would be hard 
to say that the community of the Commonwealth is organ¬ 
ized as a state — at any rate as a state of any ordinary type. 
It would be equally hard, when we remember that it has 
a common king and a system of common cooperation be¬ 
tween its various governments, to say that it is not a state. 
What is not hard is to say that it is community, and that 
the churches which ramify through it and by their com¬ 
mon life are part of its common life help to constitute this 
community. 

(6) The theme of the relation between church and state 
belongs to another inquiry. That inquiry turns on the 
point whether a community which is legally organized 
as a state should give, and whether a church should receive, 
a special legal status involving special legal rights and 
their correlative special legal duties (whether by way of 
“ establishment ” or by way of “ concordat ”) : it also turns 
on the point whether, apart from such giving of special 
legal status to a particular church, the state has a general 
legal control over all churches and, if so, to what extent 
and within what limits. 19 The present inquiry, which is 

is Since 1866 all the bishops of the Anglican communion have been in¬ 
vited, at intervals of ten years, to a conference held in London at Lambeth 
Palace, under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The con¬ 
ference includes bishops not only from Great Britain, the dominions, and 
the colonies (e.g., in Africa), but also from the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in the United States of America. 

19 There is also a further point on which the inquiry turns — whether, 


Church and Community 


56 

simply concerned with the relation between church and 
community, has already dealt with the various forms which 
the church may take within a community as one of its parts 
or aspects: it remains, in conclusion, to say some word 
about its function. 

In its essentials the function of any church, in the com¬ 
munity in which it is set and which it helps to constitute, 
is the simple function of mission — the proclamation of 
the Word of which it is custodian, under the guidance of 
the Spirit by which it is made one body. Unique among 
all other forms or parts of community in the treasure of 
which it has custody, it has to diffuse that treasure, to the 
best of its power, among the whole community. No 
church lives to itself alone; each has to give its message and 
its service to the entire community, so far as lies in its 
power; and each, in order to give, must take something 
from the community — something of its color, something 
of its general stock of ideas, something of its general 
temper and habit of life. Not that the community has 
any right, or even claim, to assimilate the churches which 
it contains to its own image. They are, in their essence, 
societies of a universal Word and communities in a uni¬ 
versal Spirit; and they shape themselves according to their 
essence — each according to its particular interpretation 
of the Word, and each according to its particular appre¬ 
hension of the Spirit. But while they shape themselves 
according to their essence, they will also color themselves 
freely and voluntarily — it may even be by an instinctive 

and if so, to what extent, the churches have a right, or rather, as some 
would prefer to say, a duty, of giving testimony and offering advice on the 
policies of the state, e.g., of social reform within or international action 
without. Today, in the democratic state, where any group may press its 
program on the state, this is one of the gravest questions before the 
churches. But it is a question which also arises, and is graver still for 
the churches, in other forms of state. 



Ernest Barker 


57 

and unconscious spontaneity — with the color and general 
character of the community in which they are set. This is 
a simple necessity if their message is to be understood by 
the people to which it is given. If a church had no com¬ 
munity color, but were a simple neutral gray — still more 
if it took the color of some other community — it would 
lose its appeal, forfeit its sympathy, and become a foreign 
body embedded in the community rather than a part of its 
life. 

But it is one thing to say that a church will assimilate 
itself to the general life of the community, in order to 
serve it better and with a better understanding. It is 
another thing, and a very different thing, to say that a 
community may, or can, assimilate a church perforce to 
itself. The community as a community has neither the 
right nor the power to attempt such assimilation. All it 
can do as a community is to diffuse the general influence 
of its whole tradition among churches, as it does among 
all the other parts of itself; and this it will do in any case, 
apart from any question of right or power, by the mere 
fact of being itself. Where right is claimed or power as¬ 
serted, it is not the community as such which is acting. 
It is the community organized as a state; more simply, it 
is the state. Only the state can claim right or assert power. 

In the discharge of its mission to the community a 
church will act in many ways. It will not only preach 
the Word, within its walls and without: it will also seek 
to provide education and general guidance (in clubs and 
camps and otherwise) for the young: it will seek to pro¬ 
vide social activities, and methods of using and enjoying 
leisure, for adults. Whatever can bring to it new ad¬ 
herents, or comfort and sustain existing members, will 
lie within its scope and be part of its duty of mission to 
the community. But here a problem arises which has be- 


Church and Community 


58 

come acute in our days, and which vitally concerns the 
general relation of churches and the community. A 
church, exalting its mission and widening its scope, may 
tend to become, at any rate in respect of its own members, 
a totalitarian body. It may seek to engulf the whole of 
their life in itself — providing them with societies, organ¬ 
ized and directed by itself, for their every activity, and 
founding, for example, special trade unions for them 
which will keep them within its fold, or special political 
parties which will tend to the same effect. It is a danger 
of such a policy that it may tend to provoke a violent re¬ 
action. The state, claiming to represent the general com¬ 
munity, may be led to exalt its mission and to widen its 
scope; going beyond its legal province, and assuming the 
function of general director and educator, it may claim 
for itself the whole guidance of youth and the whole provi¬ 
sion of social activities to fill the leisure of adults. But 
there is a graver objection to the totalitarian church than 
the danger that it may tend to provoke, by way of reaction, 
the totalitarian state. A church which assumes such a form 
is defeating the general nature of community — and de¬ 
feating also itself. 

If, as has been argued, the community is by its nature 
federal — ‘‘a community of communities ” — it is a part 
of the duty of churches to act within the federal system. 
They must recognize that they co-exist with other socie¬ 
ties — trade unions, parties, and other groups — and that 
they have to live and to make their peace with these other 
societies. If each church became a total society, and if the 
community became a community of total societies, it 
would be an irreparably divided community. Nor would 
the community only suffer. The individual would also 
suffer. It is part of his freedom that he should belong 
to more than one society within the community; it is part 
of his general education and his general moral develop- 


Ernest Barker 


59 

ment that he should learn to conciliate different loyalties, 
and to bring different duties, when they conflict, into har¬ 
mony. 

But above all — and this, from the point of view with 
which we are here concerned, is the final consideration — 
the church itself must suffer if it seeks to be total and if 
it fails to take its place and assume its station as one in the 
“ great array of differentiated social cohesions.” If the 
church has a mission to the whole community, its members 
must take their place in groups other than the church and 
carry the mission of the Word into these groups. If the 
whole church has a mission, the best way of its discharge is 
that each churchman should mix with the general com¬ 
munity and with the different groups of the community — 
not living the life withdrawn, but the life of varied fellow¬ 
ship. The church which seeks to be total is barred by its 
very zeal from its own essential duty — the duty of “ total 
mission ” in the other and truer sense of a mission to the 
whole community. It is a noble temptation of a church 
to seek to include its members for every purpose, and to 
seek to deliver to them “ the message of the church ” on 
every issue, with the authentic voice of total direction. But 
if it is noble it is also a temptation. That church best dis¬ 
charges its mission which has many missionaries, all true 
to itself, but all, in their truth to it, true also to other so¬ 
cieties, and true to the general community. The unique¬ 
ness of the church, as a society among the other societies of 
the community, is not the uniqueness of a self-contained 
and total society which peculiarly absorbs its members. 
It is the uniqueness of a society operating as a leader, 
through its individual members, in the service of other 
societies and of the whole community — a society which 
fulfills, through them, in those other societies, and in the 
whole community, the mission imposed upon it by its 
custody of the Word and the motion of the Spirit. 







THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 

by 

Marc Boegner 







I 





THE CHURCH AND THE NATION 


The fact that I use the word “ nation ” in the title of this 
paper requires me to define the sense in which I use this 
word. Why do I not use the French equivalent of the 
English word “ community,” or of the German word Volkf 

“ Community ” means society. The French language, it 
is true, gives to the word communaute the sense of the 
“ body of citizens as a whole.” But the French prefer to 
employ this word to describe a juridical regime applied to a 
society of persons living together and obedient to a com¬ 
mon rule, like a religious community. As for the word 
societe, which may be applied to any body of human beings 
with the same origin, the same customs and the same laws, 
it is most frequently used as a term in commerce or in juris¬ 
prudence or to describe a limited social area. When it is 
used without any other qualifying word it is certainly not 
the equivalent of “ community.” 

I might say the same of the word peuple, which is the 
literal translation of the German word Volk. The Dic- 
tionnaire Littre, which is authoritative in France, gives 
to the word peuple these two main definitions: (1) a num¬ 
ber of persons of the same country living under the same 
laws; (2) a number of persons who, although they do 
not inhabit the same country, have the same religion or 
the same origin (we might also add, the same language). 
In French the sovereignty of the people ( peuple) brings 
out the fact that in a democracy the power is exercised by 
the majority of the citizens, by means of their representa¬ 
tives. Further, sentences and decrees are always passed 

63 


Church and Community 


64 

“ in the name of the French people.” But in current usage 
the word peuple usually signifies the masses of the popula¬ 
tion, both the peasantry and the working people in the 
towns, as distinguished from the bourgeoisie and the 
aristocracy. 

What does the word nation mean in French? It is “ an 
association of persons inhabiting the same territory, pos¬ 
sibly but not necessarily, ruled by the same government, 
having had for a long time a sufficient number of common 
interests to cause them to be regarded as belonging to the 
same race.” 1 Thus, however great may be the part played 
by community of soil, race, language or religion in the 
formation of a nation, it seems nevertheless as though little 
by little these elements cease to preponderate, and that a 
common culture, a common tradition, common interests, 
the sense of having a common destiny to fulfill, a mission to 
accomplish, exert an increasing influence upon the de¬ 
velopment of the nation. The idea of a common origin, 
connected more particularly with the term peuple, is 
gradually replaced, in the word nation, by the feeling that 
one has certain foods in common — material, intellectual 
and spiritual — which must be preserved and developed. 

From this point of view nation and fatherland (patrie) 
are almost synonymous. For if the fatherland is defined 
as “ the country in which one is born,” it is equally “ the na¬ 
tion of which one forms part.” Nevertheless, if the 
word “ fatherland ” evokes, primarily, the image of the 
country of one’s birth, limited by its frontiers, whether 
natural or due to conquest, the land of our fathers, the 
word “ nation,” on the other hand, suggests the life of 
the human beings who inhabit this particular section of the 
earth’s surface in its entirety — the life of the community 
as a whole — including all their activities and interests, 

1 Dictionnaire Littre. 


Marc Boegner 


65 

spiritual or intellectual, economic or social, regional or 
local, since all these persons know that they have a com¬ 
mon history behind them, which binds them together; 
they are fully conscious of their firm desire to maintain this 
unity at the present time, and to transmit it to their de¬ 
scendants. 

Is it necessary to suggest that the nation must not be 
confused with the state? It is, of course, correct to say 
that the state is the extent of the country which is under 
the control of one political authority, but the state is es¬ 
sentially the sum of the powers of law and of institutions, 
by means of which, on the one hand, it is governed or 
governs itself, and, on the other hand, affirms its sover¬ 
eignty in view of other states and organizes its administra¬ 
tion. It is possible to be a nation without being a state: 
the Czech nation was a tangible reality before there was 
any Czechoslovak state. Besides, a state, both internally 
and externally, may be an organism which governs several 
nations — as, for instance, the Roman Empire before the 
invasions of the barbarians, or the empire of Austria- 
Hungary before the Great War. 

What is the origin of the nation? Is it possible to study 
it in its concrete reality, its genesis and its development? 
What do we learn in this respect from the formation of 
the French nation? Let us listen to the words of one of 
those who have studied its development with the greatest 
scientific accuracy, M. Jean Brunhes, professor at the Col¬ 
lege de France: 2 

All scholars whose minds are not ruled by absurd and dan¬ 
gerous political prejudices recognize that the part ascribed to 
race in history has been either exaggerated or distorted. No 
civilized race is pure; none of the political groups of the pres- 

2 Histoire de la nation frangaise, Vol. I, chap. 3 (Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 
1920). 


66 


Church and Community 


ent day correspond to a homogeneous race. Race does not 
exist, but the nation does; and it is the nation which has given 
to peoples of a different anthropological origin and a different 
linguistic family, and of different religious traditions, a cohe¬ 
sion, nay, even, in certain instances, an extraordinary unity. 

It may be possible to claim that France alone, at the present 
time, has achieved a stronger and a more closely knit political 
unity than other countries; a unity of soul animated by the 
supreme desire for the good of the fatherland ( patrie); yet 
possibly no other country in Europe has such a mixed popula¬ 
tion which blends into one elements drawn from nearly all the 
various races, which — one after another — have come into 
contact with this western part of the civilized world, either by 
peaceful infiltration or by invasion, and have affected the 
course of the nation’s development. 

The unity of France has issued from all this diversity. 
Without going back to the Stone Age let us recall the fact 
that since Gaul appeared in history, there has been a con¬ 
stant succession of invasions. “ Europe,” writes a French 
scholar, “ is a small peninsula joined to Asia and Africa,” 
and its western part, that is, that which was one day des¬ 
tined to become France, “ is a cul-de-sac into which the 
human tide, flowing in from the east or the south — 
driven forward by some unknown impulse — has blended 
the deposits left by one incursion after another.” 3 

All the historic races which have succeeded one another 
upon the soil of France can be distinguished in the midst 
of the later populations with which they have become 
blended. They have discovered the secret of co-existence 
and of interpenetration in such a way that today they form 
a united nation. But what a succession of stages had to be 
passed before this unity was reached! Those who wish to 
know what a nation is should examine these deep things of 
history, and realize how great was the work of coordination 


3 Breuil, quoted in Histoire de la nation ]rangaise, I, 120. 


Marc Boegner 


67 

and crystallization which, at certain periods (for instance 
toward the end of the third century before Christ), “ led 
certain groups to establish vast and strong political 
unities.” 4 

Moreover, we ought not to reduce the history of a nation 
to a struggle between two opposing races, one which domi¬ 
nates and one which is dominated. The truth is far more 
complex than that. The matter provided by the alluvial 
soil deposited upon the same spot by very different races 
has been disciplined by the spirit. But who can penetrate 
this mysterious action of the spirit? Let us say simply, with 
the French scholar whom I have already quoted, that “ al¬ 
most everywhere ethnic blends have been amalgamated by 
religious or linguistic affinities, and above all recast by 
similar habits and customs, by collective obligations, by the 
common necessity to conquer, to expand, and to hope, 
which is at the basis of every political group which deserves 
the name of nation.” 5 

Has the church had any share in this process of national 
development? And if so, what? It is impossible until we 
have gathered up the lessons of history to examine the ques¬ 
tion: What ought the church to be within the nation from 
the doctrinal point of view? 

France, which used to be called Gaul, offers a striking 
example for our consideration. When Christianity entered 
Roman Gaul religious unity had already been established 
for a long time past, in the sense that the gods of Gaul were 
united with the gods of Rome. The inhabitants of Gaul 
had given “ to their chief deities the names, the attributes, 
the legends, even the outward appearance of the great Ro¬ 
man deities.” 6 The unity of Gaul, under Latin rule, was 

4 Jean Brunhes, op. cit., p. 131. 

5 Ibid., p. 147. 

6 Camille Jullian, Gallia, pp. 207, 209 (Paris, Hachette, 1912). 


68 


Church and Community 


soon established in the name of and to the advantage of the 
divinities of the Greco-Roman pantheon. 

It was only at the close of the fourth century that Chris¬ 
tianity triumphed in Gaul, thanks very largely to St. 
Martin, bishop of Tours, whose influence was very strong. 
It was then that the Gallo-Roman aristocracy became Chris¬ 
tian. The church was gradually organized, being modeled 
on the pattern of the political society within which, after 
religious peace had been concluded, the Christians were 
able at last to find a place. The authoritarian principles 
and the administrative customs of the empire were intro¬ 
duced into the church. A hierarchy of metropolitans and 
bishops was set side by side with the imperial officials. And 
when the imperial authority vanished, “ the Christian 
church bore within herself an image of the institutions of 
the empire and part of her spirit.” 

This remark by the great historian Fustel de Coulanges 
emphasizes the strength of the bonds which, from the fourth 
century onwards, united the life of the church with the 
development of the French nation. During the whole of 
the Middle Ages when the French monarchy was seeking to 
establish its unity, the Christian church represented the 
traditions and the rules of the Roman Empire . 7 

Then there is another point to note. The church was 
born in the Roman state which had been first of all her 
enemy and then became her ally. But after the barbarian 
invasions and the fall of Rome, when new political entities 
were in process of formation, they arose within the church, 
which during the time of persecution had not ceased to 
maintain her universal character. Quite naturally and 
spontaneously the new nations sought the support of the 
church, its counsels, its traditions and its influence. Thus 
the church was associated more or less intimately, accord- 
7 Ibid., p. 234. 


Marc Boegner 


69 

ing to place and circumstance, but always very closely, 
with the growth of the nations which inherited the Roman 
Empire. 

In France for fifteen hundred years the life of the church 
was interwoven with the life of the nation. In countless 
ways she took the initiative in such spheres as the education 
of the young, the care of the sick, and the assistance of 
people in all kinds of trouble and misery. Some of the 
monks cultivated the soil, while others helped the people 
of France to realize that they had a divine vocation, that 
God had charged the French people with a universal mis¬ 
sion. Gesta Dei per Francos! From the fourth to the 
fifteenth century the church was one of the most effective 
instruments of the political, intellectual and social unity of 
the French nation, having already given their nation its 
religious unity. 

The national tragedy which followed the reform move¬ 
ment of the sixteenth century in France reveals still more 
strikingly the part played by the Catholic Church in the 
development of the nation. By the policy of ruthless sup¬ 
pression of heresy which she proclaimed and supported 
with all her power, by the part which she played in the 
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Roman Church was 
to a large extent responsible not only for the troubles 
which agitated the life of France for more than two hun¬ 
dred years, but for the violent reaction which took place 
in the eighteenth century, which was directed against the 
political action of the church and its influence in every part 
of the national life. This reaction became still stronger 
when, in the nineteenth century (after the wars of the 
Revolution and of the Empire) the Roman Church tried, 
time after time, to recapture her political influence. The 
concrete problem of the relation between the Christian 
churches and the French nation cannot be understood at 


Church and Community 


70 

all unless we remember: (a) that for many centuries the 
Roman Catholic Church played a great part in the political 
life of the nation, as well as in its social and intellectual 
life; and ( b ) that one section of the French people, since 
the eighteenth century, has offered an increasingly hostile 
resistance to the encroachments of the same church in the 
actual political domain. We must never forget that anti¬ 
clericalism— that is to say, the resolve to eliminate the 
Roman Church from the political life of the nation — 
has played a part in France which cannot be exaggerated. 
All this long past, with its ebb and flow, means that at 
the present moment the great problem, church, nation, 
and state, implies to a French mind concrete data which 
a doctrinal study of the question has no right to ignore. 

I open the Bible, I make myself listen, in the fellowship 
of the church, to the revelation which God gives in the 
Holy Scriptures. Has the nation a place in this revelation? 
And since in these days we are fond of constructing doc¬ 
trines on the basis of the distinction between different 
“ orders,” to what “ order ” does the nation belong? 

Certainly not to the order of creation. The distinctions 
between the sexes, marriage, the family and society depend 
incontestably upon the order of creation. The nations, 
on the contrary, do not appear till after the fall, and even 
after the flood. The mysterious but very significant story 
of the tower of Babel shows, in the division of the descend¬ 
ants of Noah into nations, one of the fruits of sin, a punish¬ 
ment which God inflicts upon “ unified humanity,” under¬ 
taking proudly to build a city whose towers should reach 
unto heaven. Father Fessard has written recently: 

Perhaps we have not sufficiently noted the parallelism of this 
scene with that of the Garden of Eden. It is, however, very 
striking, even in its inclusion of certain anthropomorphic fea¬ 
tures. I am sure that I am not going too far in my interpreta- 


Marc Boegner 


7* 

tion, as a Christian, of the Scriptures for the ordering of life, 
if I say that just as the sin of Adam represents original sin in 
the individual, so the building of the tower of Babel represents 
original sin in society, as such. 

This, he continues, is the sin which breeds pride in group 
form, first of all that of a nation which deifies itself, but still 
more that of humanity which desires to create the new 
man . . . without God . 8 

Thus the division of humanity, which is in bondage 
to sin, into nations, belongs to the order of the fall. Not¬ 
withstanding the sovereign action of God, the nations do 
not escape from it. “ He increaseth the nations and de- 
stroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations and straighteneth 
them again .” 9 The birth, the life, the death of a nation, 
the absorption of one nation by another are normal phe¬ 
nomena for the people in the Bible. Like civilizations, 
nations are mortal. And the Christian who has learned 
from the Holy Scriptures that “ all nations before Him 
are as nothing ” 10 will not be astonished at this truth as 
others might be. 

And yet in his providence God uses the nation itself, 
the result of sin, as a means of preserving humanity from 
worse disorders. Like the state, but in a different way, the 
nation helps to check the unrestrained indulgence of men’s 
appetites which would lead them into the chaos of animal 
conflict. Without using the constraint proper to the state, 
by the one fact that the nation binds her citizens together 
by common interests and common necessities in face of 
common dangers she leads them to repress their mutual 
egoism and to submit to an end willed by all and for all. 
Thus the nation is the school in which God wishes to teach 
man that He has brought him into being not in order that 

8 Pax Nostra, p. 251 (Paris, Grasset, 1936). 

9 Job 12:23. 10 Isa. 40:17. 


Church and Community 


72 

he should live alone, seeking and finding his end in him¬ 
self, but that he should live with others, in a society where 
he serves his apprenticeship to the only true life, life in 
community, freely accepted and freely practiced. Thus 
we may say that the nation depends upon the order of 
preservation. Assuredly this accomplishment of the life 
of the person in the social life would have been realized 
apart from the fall in the family and in the human society, 
which belong, as we have already seen, to the order of 
creation. But sin has broken all the ties of community 
willed by God, and it is in the nation, where families are 
forced to realize their solidarity in the pursuit of a common 
end, that man is called to meet the problem of human com¬ 
munity and to discover that its solution demands that he 
accept and desire liberation from his personal self-cen¬ 
teredness. 

Let me repeat it once again: God is the Lord of the 
nations. “ He hath made of one blood all nations of men/’ 
said Paul at Athens, “ for to dwell on all the face of the 
earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, 
and the bounds of their habitation.” 11 Thus the diversity 
of the nations, with the genius proper to each of them, is 
willed by God, but this does not impair the unity of their 
origin, nor does it place any obstacle in the way of the 
unity, in Christ, of the children of God. 

Does what has just been said about the nations in general 
apply to the Jewish nation? Let us recognize that the 
latter belongs to the order of redemption. The fruit of a 
divine election, honored by the covenant with God, be¬ 
fore the coming of Jesus Christ she was the ancient church, 
the church which waits until the heavens are opened and 
God descends upon the earth. But she is also the rebel 
nation, toward whom, all the day long, God is spreading 

11 Acts 17:26. 


Marc Boegner 


73 

out his hands . 12 Because she has rejected the well-beloved 
Son the Kingdom shall be taken away from her and given 
to others. However, a way of hope and of salvation remains 
open to her, which she will not enter “ until the fullness 
of the Gentiles [nations] be come in.” 13 Then the division 
of the nations, the fruit of and chastisement for sin, will 
become, by the grace of God, a source of blessing for hu¬ 
manity. “ In that day,” says Isaiah, “ shall Israel be the 
third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the 
midst of the land; whom the Lord of Hosts shall bless, say¬ 
ing, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of 
my Hands, and Israel mine inheritance.” 14 

This is, in brief compass, the significance of the nation 
from the point of view of revelation. What part should 
the church have in the life of the nation? Here we are 
not concerned with a study of history but with examining 
in the light of revealed doctrine whether the church has 
her own mission to fulfill within the nation, and if so, 
what is this mission? But first of all, what is the church 
with which we are here concerned? 

For the purpose of the paper it will be sufficient to in¬ 
dicate in a few words the doctrine of the church represented 
in it. 

Within the nation the church may appear to be one 
association alongside of others. And yet she does not in 
any way resemble other associations. She is not a human 
institution, a group of men and women which is the fruit 
of an initiative taken by man. She has no connection with 
a society for moral culture. She is the church, the assembly 
of believers, which God, by means of Christ, has called to 
know and to serve him. She is willed eternally by God; 
this will of God is accomplished by Christ in the body of 
which he is the Head. It is the divine initiative which has 


12 Isa. 65:2. 


is Rom. 11:25. 


14 Isa. 19:24-25. 


Church and Community 


74 

founded the church, and it is his action which maintains 
her. In the midst of sinful humanity, and therefore in the 
heart of the nation, the church is an enduring miracle of 
the grace of God. 

And this remains true in spite of all the church’s im¬ 
perfections and frailties, the divisions which rend her life 
asunder, the sin of men and women who yet are and 
desire to be her loyal members. So far as she proclaims 
Jesus Christ, preaches the Word of God and administers 
the sacraments, the church fulfills the mission which has 
been assigned to her by her Head. At no moment and 
under no form has she the right to substitute herself for 
Jesus Christ. Her sole mission is to witness to her only 
Lord and Saviour. 

The church is called to exercise this mission within a 
definite nation. It is this fact which causes the various 
problems which we must now examine. 

But even before we begin to examine them there is 
one remark which I must make. The church is in the 
nation, not only because she proclaims the gospel to the 
nation in the national language, because her sanctuaries 
are built upon the national soil, because her action tends to 
penetrate the people as a whole, but also because her mem¬ 
bers are citizens of the nations. This is a situation which 
is in the highest degree paradoxical. In the church the 
members are aware that they belong to a society which 
is totally different from all those to which, as citizens, they 
are attached within the nation. They belong to two 
worlds. And the church, too, belongs to two worlds. In 
the one, the world of eternal realities, she finds her true 
city; in the other, the nation in which God asks her to 
bear her witness, she is at home because it is the father- 
land of her members; but she cannot and she ought not 
to forget that her origin is not of this world and that she 
must always help men to enter into and walk along the 


Marc Boegner 75 

path to their true fatherland, “ that which is in the 
heavens.” 

After that, can we speak of a “ national ” church? Let 
us admit that this kind of language leads to the most 
serious confusion of thought. It conceals the supra¬ 
national character of the church; it implies an acquies¬ 
cence in a parcelling out of the Body of Christ, added to 
that caused by doctrinal divisions, and it permits people 
to imagine that the unity of the church is based primarily 
upon nationality. 

A national church does not avoid the dangers inherent 
in her situation unless: 

(1) her constitution indicates in the most precise and 
clear way that only the “ faithful ” — in the Christian sense 
of this phrase — are members of the church; 

(2) the church welcomes with open arms the faithful 
from other nations who are living within her own land; 

(3) the church shows clearly, by her missionary work 
in pagan lands, as well as by her close union with churches 
of the same confession, that she does not limit her horizon 
to the national frontiers; 

(4) the church safeguards her spiritual independence, 
not only with regard to the state, but also with regard 
to the nation, for public opinion may wish to exert a pres¬ 
sure upon the national church which is incompatible with 
the preservation of her independence. 

Then, are we not led to assert that the church ought 
not to be tied to the state, whether by the acceptance of 
an official position which makes the church one of the 
powers of the state and her ministers officials paid by the 
state, by a convention (concordat, or anything else of that 
kind) implying a possible return for the services rendered 
by the church to the nation, even by actual grants of 
money? 

To this I would answer that although the church is 


Church and Community 


76 

bound to preserve her spiritual independence at all costs, 
this does not seem to me to exclude entirely all juridical 
financial relations between the church and the state. 
However, it is evident that the more the church is free 
from all connection with the state and from all indebted¬ 
ness to the official support of the state, the easier it is for 
her when she is attacked or even persecuted to be faithful 
to the accomplishment of her unique mission. The more, 
on the contrary, that she seeks and finds in the state a moral 
and material support, the more difficult it will be for her 
to be the witness which God wishes her to be in all respects 
and under all circumstances. 

The church ought not to consent to be at the service 
of the nation, nor should the nation allow the church 
to interfere with those spheres of national life which do 
not come under her jurisdiction. It will be necessary to 
make certain observations on both these topics. 

Let us first of all guard against a misunderstanding. The 
members of the church are bound, in so far as they are 
citizens of the nation, to serve her, in all that is not opposed 
to that which they owe to God, all the more loyally, because 
both the obligation to serve the nation and the method of 
doing this come from God. In all the spheres of political, 
social and intellectual life in which their profession or their 
culture makes it possible for them to judge, it is both their 
right and their duty to form a personal opinion upon the 
problems raised by the nation, and to bring their actions 
and their words into accordance with this opinion; here, 
however, we are not dealing with what is said and done by 
the members of the church either individually or in groups 
as laymen or as members of the ordained ministry as citi¬ 
zens, and as Christian citizens. The faithful, in smaller or 
larger groups, may in very different ways feel themselves 
called to intervene in the life of the nation, to pronounce 


Marc Boegner 


77 

an opinion upon this or that national problem: they are 
not the church. Some members of the ordained ministry, 
some pastors, may, in certain circumstances, seek to take 
action in this or that region of the national life; they are 
not the church. We cannot and we ought not to speak of 
the action of the church save when this action has been 
decided by the doctrinal and disciplinary authority of the 
church: for instance, by the pope in the Roman Catholic 
Church, or by the National Synod in the Reformed 
Church, or indeed, where several Reformed churches exist 
side by side, the organ to which they have entrusted the 
duty of representing them to the nation. It is in this sense 
alone that I am here thinking of the action of the church. 

What does it mean for the church to be at the service 
of the nation? It certainly does not mean that it is the 
duty of the church to teach the faithful that they have 
certain duties toward their own country, and that the first 
of these duties is love of country. The church is serving 
God, and not the nation. But the church would be serv¬ 
ing the nation, and not God, were she to allow her members 
to believe, either that the service of the nation can be 
equated with the service of God, or that it has an absolute 
character, or that anyone save God has the right to deter¬ 
mine what their patriotism ought to be. The same would 
be true if the church were to allow her claim that her 
mission transcends all national interests to be watered 
down, however legitimate these interests may be and how¬ 
ever clear a duty it may be for Christian citizens to support 
and defend them. To confuse the mission of the church 
with national ends would be fatal for the church; the mis¬ 
sion of the church is of a different nature from these na¬ 
tional ends; it is concerned solely with the salvation of 
man and his eternal destiny. 

With still more reason the church ought not to allow 


Church and Community 


78 

herself to be used by the nation for its own purposes, even 
in the interests of the nation, especially if these purposes 
have no connection with the mission of the church. For 
instance, it is not the business of the church to put her 
signature to an appeal, addressed to the nation, calling for 
subscriptions to a public loan. Other temptations to make 
use of the church exist and will continue to occur. In re¬ 
fusing to give way to them the church must seize the oppor¬ 
tunity to define clearly her unique position within the 
nation. 

It is, of course, evident that the menace of war, and 
war itself, affecting the nation as a whole, presents the 
church with problems of peculiar gravity. As these will 
be studied in detail in another volume in this series they 
will not be examined here. 

Although the church is at the service of God within the 
nation, and resolutely faithful to her sole mission of wit¬ 
ness, she will not be indifferent to the national life. Be¬ 
cause her loyal members participate in this national life, 
because she is their life, because to a certain extent it is 
they who form the nation, the church is aware of every 
vibration in the national life. She shares in the joys and 
sorrows of the nation, but she does not share in its anger 
nor in its hatred. And because she must be always and 
supremely the presence of Jesus Christ in the nation, in¬ 
dissolubly united to her Lord who wept over the Holy City, 
she knows how to summon the nation to humiliation and 
repentance, she humbles herself and repents with and for 
the nation, thus bearing witness to the destiny of the na¬ 
tion, which infinitely transcends all human achievements. 

The nation, as I have already said, must not permit the 
church to interfere in those spheres of the national life 
which do not concern her. But is it really true that there 
are spheres in the life of the nation which are entirely 


Marc Boegner 


79 

outside the competence of the church? Is it not true that 
human beings are engaged in these spheres, and since they 
compose the church, is it not the duty of the church to 
stand by them as the vigilant witness to the will of God? 
Without reopening the question — so violently disputed 
— of the primacy of the spiritual, are we not justified in 
claiming that the spiritual is involved in all human activity 
and thus that the church cannot be indifferent to it? 

The problem is a delicate one. I would say frankly 
that I do not think the same solution can be given in 
each nation. In one nation the intervention of the church 
in a certain domain of public life will be regarded as 
a normal, perhaps even desirable proceeding, while in the 
adjoining nation such intervention would be severely con¬ 
demned. These different reactions are sometimes due to 
questions of principle, but more often to collective reac¬ 
tions due to a long history of good or bad relations be¬ 
tween the church and the nation, or between the church 
and an important section of the nation. Why not say 
frankly that French opinion would not allow the church 
to take steps which the greater part of British public 
opinion would — upon the whole — consider to be in ac¬ 
cordance with the mission of the church? Perhaps in cer¬ 
tain countries national opinion would render a great 
service to the church by persuading her not to compromise 
herself by a definite political attitude, and simply to remain 
exclusively faithful to her mission which she has received 
from Jesus Christ. 

I do not think that anyone will deny that the church 
is called to denounce unceasingly those evils which, since 
they pervert human souls, corrupt the very sources of na¬ 
tional life; that even if she does not initiate certain crusades 
herself she ought to give them the support of her authority; 
that in face of social evils and wrongs she ought to make 


8 o 


Church and Community 


the voice of the Christian conscience heard; that, faced 
by the serious dangers which menace the peace of the na¬ 
tion or of humanity, she ought to proclaim the demands 
of the gospel with reference to men and nations. Further, 
everyone will admit, I am sure, that the church ought to 
warn, not only the faithful, but the whole nation, against 
attacks — open and concealed — on the part of militant 
atheism, not only on the Christian faith itself, but on 
every form of religious belief; it is also her duty to show 
clearly, in the sight of the nation, the incompatibility of 
certain political or economic doctrines, whatever their ori¬ 
gin may be, with the essential affirmations of Christianity. 
But in carrying out these tasks the church must take care 
that she does not slip from the religious sphere into the 
political or economic sphere; she must see to it that she is, 
and that she remains, simply and solely the church which 
bears witness to the Word of God, and proclaims Jesus 
Christ. 

To those who claim that the church ought to serve the 
nation I would say: The greatest service that the church 
can render the nation is to be the church. And this re¬ 
mains true whether the nation as a whole is favorable to 
the church or indifferent to her, and even if the nation re¬ 
gards the church with distrust or hostility. 

To the faithful, first and foremost, the church must be 
the church. Within the life of the nation they may be, and 
often are, opposed to one another by their political con¬ 
victions and their social ideas. They may even come into 
conflict with one another; sometimes, alas, they are tempted 
to hate one another! If the church allows herself to be 
drawn into their conflicts, they will be the first to blame 
her, perhaps even to leave her. For them she will no 
longer be the church. On the other hand, she will remain 
the church if she teaches them the duty of acquiring a 


Marc Boegner 


81 


Christian idea of the nation, if she invites them to study, as 
Christians, all the problems which are raised by the life of 
the nation, and to promote this study within groups of 
Christians; if, finally, she persuades them that she wants to 
help them to act as Christians in the accomplishment of 
their human task whatever it may be. 

The church is, and ought to be, the one and only place 
where all the citizens who are drawn into opposite camps 
by their political or social conflicts can escape from the 
obsession of these difficult problems in the national life; 
the church is the only place where, together, they invoke 
Our Father and ask him, “ Forgive us our trespasses, as we 
forgive them that trespass against us ”; the church is the 
only place where together they approach the table of the 
Lord and share in the same Body and Blood. This church, 
which is the church of Jesus Christ, renders the nation the 
only service which the latter ought to receive from her; and 
by the grace of God she gives to the nation men who, be¬ 
cause their life is “ rooted in love,” are henceforth within 
her servants of truth, justice and peace. But the church is, 
and also ought to be, the only place where the citizens of 
a nation are reminded not only that the nation is not an 
end in itself, not only that the nation ought to be in com¬ 
munity with other nations, for the sake of the common 
good of humanity, but still more and above all, that the 
ultimate end assigned to it by God is, beyond all national 
distinctions, the Kingdom where “ God shall be all in all.” 












CHURCH AND NATION 


by 

Hanns Lilje 



CHURCH AND NATION 


In its wider aspect, the problem of church and nation 
is concerned with the general Christian attitude to com¬ 
munity life as a whole. This entails an inquiry into the 
causes and aspects of the present crisis in community life 
throughout the world, and also into the solution which 
Christianity offers not only to the individual problems 
raised by this crisis, but also to the great fundamental 
problems of human society in general. 

The more restricted aspect of the inquiry, as shown more 
especially in the German formula, “ Kirche, Volk und 
Stoat ” deals with the Christian understanding of “ folk,” 
as represented today in various aspects of the new folk 
consciousness. 

In its second more specialized meaning this question 
confronts the church with one of the most fundamental 
problems in the cultural life of the modern world, for it 
is one of the most urgent tasks of the Christian church 
in our times to hear and to answer, on the basis of the 
Scriptures and the confessions, the question raised in many 
parts of the world by the new folk consciousness. 

I. THE REVIVAL OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND 
THE PRESENT CRISIS IN HUMAN COMMUNITY 

Any diagnosis of this revival must start from the same 
considerations as those underlying the Christian attitude 
to the whole problem of modern society: namely, the break¬ 
ing up of all social forms throughout the present-day 
world. This problem of “ mass disintegration,” the end- 

85 


86 


Church and Community 


product namely of a completely individualized age, mani¬ 
fests itself in the dissolution of all social relationships, 
thus rendering null and void all binding order and pro¬ 
ducing a state of chaos in which any true and sincere re¬ 
lation between man and man is no longer possible. 

During the last ten years, this state of affairs has been the 
constant preoccupation of Western philosophy and the¬ 
ology. The church also has given much thought to the 
same phenomena and has endeavored to find means to over¬ 
come them. Hence the discussions on the theology of 
“ the orders,” which has opened up new avenues of thought 
for Christianity. 

From this point of view, however, the problem of na¬ 
tionality assumes still another meaning. It is not just one 
among many possible means for overcoming the present- 
day crisis in society. “ Nationality,” as conceived through¬ 
out large areas of the modern world, and, if we are not 
mistaken, particularly so at certain focuses of supreme his¬ 
torical importance, no longer presents a problem, but is an 
actually experienced historical fact. This historical ex¬ 
perience confronts man with all the signs of historical 
reality. Large bodies of young people nowadays, among 
those nations in the grip of a newly awakened national 
consciousness, look on their nationality as the primary and 
fundamental reality of all. It forms the starting point of 
all their thinking, and no way of thinking which does 
not respect this new viewpoint can, in their eyes, measure 
up to reality. In their eyes, the concept “ nation ” does 
not, therefore, raise any problems or questions; they re¬ 
gard it as a sign of the emergence in history of primeval 
forces which mold and determine the life of man; they 
experience it as a form of historical power and reality to 
which all individuals must of necessity be subordinate, 
forming as it does the very basis of life for the community 
as well as for the individual. 


Hanns Lilje 87 

This being so, it is obviously the duty of the church 
to reconsider this problem carefully and to arrive at a 
clear conception of its attitude toward it. In so doing it 
will make a twofold discovery. On the one hand, it must 
needs undergo the test of considering what degree of reality 
its message possesses when measured against the reality of 
national consciousness; and on the other hand, it will dis¬ 
cover that its consideration of this problem does not deal 
merely with a side issue but involves a consideration of the 
very basis of its faith. 

2. THE REALITY OF NATIONALITY 

A valuable indication of the answer to the question what 
constitutes a nation is given by the peculiar character of 
the re-emergence, in the immediate past, of national con¬ 
sciousness as a powerful historical force. For those whose 
entire sociological philosophy is based on the fact of na¬ 
tionality, as constituting the primordial and all-inclusive 
reality, it is useless to begin with a theory of the nature of 
nationality. For many people today, their nationality is 
above all a concrete fact and a newly experienced historical 
reality. The forms of social life having broken up, the 
collective will of a people is thrown back upon its natural 
foundations, that is, its inherent national genius. With 
this as a starting point, merely theoretical considerations 
must necessarily take a back seat. Consequently the his¬ 
torical experience of national life is of greater importance 
than any single question as to its nature and its constituent 
factors. This is why theories of nationality are often dis¬ 
missed as mere intellectualism, and stress is laid on the 
instinctive blood relationship and the historical heritage 
of the national community life. The one key to an under¬ 
standing of nationality is held to consist in participation in 
the common historical experience of the birth and growth 
of a nation. 


88 


Church and Community 


The deprecation of all merely intellectual theories of 
nationality is the expression of a perfectly sound attitude. 
For up to the present it has not proved possible completely 
to explain the phenomenon of nationality on purely ra¬ 
tional lines. “ So far every sociology has suffered ship¬ 
wreck on the problem of nationality.” 1 Actually the main 
significance of such theories of nationality as we possess is 
to act as pointers to the various component elements of 
national life. Consequently all these theories emphasize 
as a rule one or more of the formative factors in the life 
of a people, such as consanguinity, a common biological 
descent, or the manner of life as conditioned by climate, 
the soil, or the geographical lie of the land — a connection 
much stressed by the new school of geo-political research 
— common customs, or something else. 

All these current theories of nationality enshrine, as a 
rule, one aspect of the truth. The same applies to the 
view that race is the foundation of national life. To ob¬ 
viate any misunderstanding, the following should be 
noted: whereas the new line of political thought in Ger¬ 
many is based on the race, this must not be taken as a 
simple biological concept, but as a symbol of organic na¬ 
tional unity, physically, mentally and spiritually. 

There is only one traditional theory of nationality which 
can be dismissed straight away as lacking in realism, namely 
the purely rationalistic explanation. The theory of na¬ 
tionality which sees in the communal life of a nation the 
result of a contrat social is entirely false, for the simple 
reason that it awakens the false notion that this community 
life is something which is brought about by the rational 
exercise of the common will of those concerned. But the 
characteristic feature of nationality lies precisely in its very 
quality of givenness or pre-existence; it is a state which 

i Sasse, Das Volk nach der Lehre der evangelischen Kirche (1933), p. 24. 


Hanns Lilje 89 

exists prior to our considerations and decisions, so that our 
nationality confronts us with a pre-existent claim. Any 
theory of nationality which compares it to a voluntary so¬ 
ciety denies thereby the essential difference existing be¬ 
tween the communal life of a nation and every other form 
of human society which rests on voluntary association. 

The theories of nationality sponsored by German ro¬ 
manticism and philosophy were the first to oppose such 
rationalistic conceptions by drawing attention once more 
to the reality of national community. It is not merely a 
matter of chance that these theories originated at a time 
of national decline, when the longing for national great¬ 
ness broke forth with redoubled vigor; and for that very 
reason they were able to describe most clearly the reality 
and peculiar significance of nationality. Whereas the 
idealists Fichte and Hegel upheld the claims of the father- 
land and clearly described its super-individual grandeur 
and authority, romanticism, casting its net still wider, re¬ 
discovered and described the individual and specific fea¬ 
tures of a nation, namely the mother tongue, the land and 
a common historical heritage. In so doing they added con¬ 
siderably to our understanding of nationality, inasmuch as 
they drew attention to the importance for a people of a 
common historical destiny. For the life of a people can¬ 
not be explained merely by natural factors: its common 
historical destiny is equally important. It is precisely this 
common historical destiny which develops a nation out of 
the natural circumstances in which it originates. The ro¬ 
mantic movement first drew attention to the fact that a na¬ 
tion cannot be exclusively explained either as the product 
of its biological antecedents or of some theoretical con¬ 
siderations, but that it is at the same time a corporeal and 
spiritual entity — to use an expression of Hamann, that 
great counterpart of Kant. 


90 Church and Community 

This last consideration must form the starting point of 
every modern theory of nation and nationality; i.e., any 
description of the essential nature of a people must take 
into account two things: 

The natural bases of nation and nationality, the natural 
component parts, may vary greatly. But the foundation 
always rests in some way or another on descent from a com¬ 
mon blood stock. Race, in the narrower or wider sense, 
blood relationship and soil do, as a matter of fact, form 
the natural foundations of a people. It is obvious that this 
racial foundation does not necessarily involve any special 
racial “ purity ” — the scientific possibility or probability 
of which need not be discussed here. A nation may equally 
well result from the mixture of various “ pure ” races, and 
nevertheless produce a common natural type, as shown in 
stature, build, and the color of skin and hair. Every 
serious student of ethnology is, moreover, aware that the 
possession of similar external characteristics does not nec¬ 
essarily imply a common national stock. There are other 
external natural phenomena which are equally important, 
more particularly those on which modern geo-political re¬ 
search lays special stress, namely external conditions of life 
due to a common habitat, and climatic and geographical 
unity or dissimilarity. And finally, to all these external 
considerations must be added those factors, dependent on 
the natural conditions of life, which form and determine 
the common customs of a people. 

The second constituent element in the life of a nation 
consists in its historical background. Therein lies, as a 
matter of fact, the most important observation on the es¬ 
sence of nationality, for it points to the mystery which 
broods over the beginnings of all political life. This mys¬ 
tery consists in the emergence of a nation into history. 
The natural features of a people can neither entirely ex- 


Hanns Lilje gi 

plain its experience nor describe the actual plenitude of its 
life. The rise of a nation, in the fullest sense, is a his¬ 
torical process as little capable of explanation as any other 
great fact of history. The perception of this fact has a 
threefold significance. 

Full nationality is only achieved when a people enters 
the realm of history. The real existence of a nation first 
begins in that moment in time when it enters the com¬ 
munity of nations as an entity which is subject to the mold¬ 
ing forces of history and in its turn shapes the course of 
history. It is equally possible for a nation to relapse 
once more into the nonhistorical condition from which it 
sprang: whereupon its existence as a people actually ceases. 
Historical examples of this may be seen in the state of sus¬ 
pended animation of certain tribes of the Near East and of 
northern Egypt, which have regressed from a position of 
historical eminence to the nonhistorical condition of the 
fellahin. On the other hand, if a people becomes con¬ 
scious once more of its origin, the phenomenon of national 
“ rebirth ” takes place, in virtue of which it once more be¬ 
comes historically effective. 

The consciousness, therefore, of a historical “ vocation ” 
or “ mission ” forms an integral part of the essence of a 
nation. When a nation lays claim to such a historical mis¬ 
sion, this is not a false exaggeration of its own national 
importance — that occurs only when it claims a false ab¬ 
solutism or assumes divine powers — but the expression of 
its will to be a nation in the true historical sense of the 
word. The historical life of a people in the fullest sense 
waxes and wanes in proportion to its consciousness of such 
a mission. What precisely determines the entry of a nation 
into history remains completely inexplicable. It is one of 
the great mysteries of world history by what process a 
people, hitherto invisible on the stage of world history. 


Church and Community 


92 

suddenly emerges into historical prominence and activity 
and begins to act as an independent entity in virtue of a 
common calling and of consciousness of a common mis¬ 
sion. Such activity and an actual historical experience 
of its vocation are the necessary conditions for complete 
emergence of a nation. Whatever different forms the con¬ 
sciousness of such a calling may take — ranging in degree 
from a lust for conquest to a consciousness of a mission for 
peace — it is this process which constitutes the actual proc¬ 
ess of becoming a nation. It is primarily through the 
close, indissoluble mingling of both these lines of develop¬ 
ment, the one conditioned by natural circumstances, the 
other by the sense of a historical mission, that the final 
growth into full national maturity is achieved. The term 
“ nation ” is only then bestowed on a people when it has 
effectively entered the realm of history. 

The two expressions of the full emergence of a nation 
into history are language and statecraft. 

Language is not only the noblest, but also the most de¬ 
finite, expression of national consciousness. It is impos¬ 
sible to imagine any nation which is really effective his¬ 
torically without a language of its own, although the 
boundaries of language and nationality do not always coin¬ 
cide. Nevertheless, on principle, a mother tongue is the 
clearest expression of the fact that a people has become 
a spiritual entity, for language is the vessel charged with 
the spiritual and historical, the political and natural herit¬ 
age of a nation. Tribal conglomerations, emerging from 
a prehistoric or subhistoric existence, first enter the full 
light of history when they are able to express their own 
spiritual destiny in their own individual language. 

If language is the essential expression of the spiritual 
character of a nation, the shaping of its political destiny is 
mainly dependent on the state. But here also it becomes 


Hanns Lilje 93 

necessary to draw attention to the fact that the frontiers 
of a people do not necessarily coincide with its political 
frontiers. Thus, according to the statements of Dr. May, 
a theologian who has contributed most valuable researches 
on the nature of nationality, there exist in the eleven newly 
formed post-war states of southeastern Europe thirty-five 
million people who are obliged to live, not within their 
own political boundaries, but as national minorities. Of 
course these cases are exceptional and exhibit all those 
difficulties which must needs arise wherever “ the right of 
self-determination of a people ” has not been realized. 
Nevertheless, it is still possible even under such hard his¬ 
torical circumstances for a people of strong national char¬ 
acter to maintain its spiritual integrity, its customs, and 
the form of civilization appropriate to its national genius. 

But such exceptions in no wise alter the fact that, on 
principle, a nation achieves full historical maturity under 
its own political form of government. Full historical de¬ 
velopment is only then attained when a nation has found 
its own political form. This process of taking political 
shape may stretch over long periods, and those nations 
which have taken a long time over the actual building up 
of their political structure are by no means those least 
capable of great historical achievement. But, on principle, 
it is not possible to conceive of full historical effectiveness 
without political self-government. Even separate national 
groups, existing as scattered communities ( diasporai ), 
usually maintain their life solely in virtue of the possession 
of a mother country with a political regime of its own. 
The ideal political development of a people is a national 
state where nation and state possess the same common 
boundaries and the political structure corresponds most 
closely to the national genius. 

From this fundamental conception of the nature of 


Church and Community 


94 

nationality there follows one more essential conclusion, 
namely, that a nation is not founded on the free association 
of individuals, and is moreover, as proved by its whole 
existence, completely exempt from the arbitrary decisions 
of individuals. A man has to accept the fact of his nation¬ 
ality as a pre-existent condition; he is as little able to 
choose his nationality as his sex — it is simply given to 
him, an endowment. Since his nation existed before him, 
so also it stands above him. From this it follows that an 
individual only attains to national consciousness when he 
experiences the claims which his national community has 
on him. Just as a people only attains full historical being 
when it becomes aware of its historical “ calling,” so an 
individual becomes conscious of being part of a nation 
when he experiences the authority and the claim which 
the nation makes on him. This authority which his 
country exercises over him is genuine authority. For the 
individual can neither terminate this relationship nor 
explain it; he remains subordinated to it in his whole 
being. 

3. THE CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION OF THE NATIONAL 
COMMUNITY 

All that has been said so far about the fact of nationality 
remains true without any reference to Christian belief. 
It is, therefore, not entirely a matter of chance that the 
re-emergence of national consciousness in many parts of 
the world does not as a rule proceed from any reawaken¬ 
ing of the Christian spirit. On the contrary, there is an 
undeniable cleavage between the Christian and a purely 
national conception of life, which results in a state of ten¬ 
sion and conflict at more than one place in the world, and 
this is true quite as much in the older Christian countries 
as in the younger churches in the mission field. 


Hanns Lilje 95 

We are consequently faced with the question: What 
importance may be ascribed to the Christian view of na¬ 
tional community? 

We must start with the fact that neither the Bible nor 
the confessional statements of the Lutheran Reformation 
offer any coherent Christian doctrine of nationality. The 
Reformation taught that the church cannot give any 
specifically Christian doctrine of nationality to which the 
empirical life of nations must conform. Among the com¬ 
munity of nations, the church exists in the world and not 
side by side with the world. That is why it is contrary to 
Lutheran teaching to attempt forcibly to mold the life 
of nations in accordance with any preconceived biblical 
or doctrinal theory. The only way in which the church 
can obtain clear insight into the nature of nationality is by 
a sober acknowledgment of actual historical facts. That 
is why neither Holy Scripture nor the doctrines of the 
Lutheran Church contain any developed teaching about 
nationality. The numerous references to the state, that 
other great phenomenon of the communal life of men, 
form a striking contrast to the casual and incidental ref¬ 
erences to the fact of nationality. And however much 
may be gleaned from these isolated remarks as to the 
proper behavior of Christians as members of a nation, 
they offer no consistent theory of nationality which could 
compete with existing ones, and be related to them either 
on equal or superior terms. This admission obviously does 
not mean that Christians are, therefore, left without any 
guidance as to the attitude they should adopt towards 
nationality. It only means that they must seek guidance 
from other aspects and fundamental truths of scriptural 
and Reformation doctrine. They will then discover that 
this larger body of witness provides the church, as well 
as the individual Christian, with definite guidance, clearly 


Church and Community 


96 

expressed. The nation, as such, is not the subject matter 
of the Christian creed: but it exists within the strong and 
stable divine order from which it derives its true meaning. 

In order to make this clear, we will now consider what 
the Scriptures have to say about nationality. 

An exposition of Bible teaching about the national com¬ 
munity meets with one important difficulty. Scriptural 
statements about what we nowadays understand by nation 
are by no means unambiguous, and in this they show a 
marked contrast to the Bible doctrine of the state. The 
New Testament especially is constantly revealing the his¬ 
torical fact that the primitive Christian community was 
aware that it coincided with the greatest, the most closely 
knit and impressive political system of its time — namely, 
that of imperial Rome. In contradistinction to this, the 
conception of nation was relegated to the background. 
This applies mainly to the New Testament, where only 
casual mention is made of “ nation ” in the modern sense, 
but it also applies to the Old Testament, where in spite of 
numerous references to other nations as well as to the na¬ 
tional destiny of the people of Israel, one must admit that 
statements about nationality itself are, on the whole, 
meager. 

It would obviously be completely false to conclude from 
this that the Bible says nothing of the Christian conception 
of nation. It goes without saying that the historical en¬ 
vironment of biblical times, whether considered from the 
point of view of religious or of cultural history, was entirely 
different from the political and social situation of today. 
But it is much more important to point out that in order to 
understand the Bible view of nationality, the fact that 
nations and nationality come within the scope of the di¬ 
vine purpose is of much greater import than any reflections 
on a changing historical situation. There are three en- 


Hanns Lilje 97 

tirely unambiguous features which characterize the main 
trend of biblical teaching on the subject of nationality, 
namely: (a) the doctrine of the unity of the human race; 
(b) the recognition that the plurality and diversity of 
nations is a condition willed by God, and (c) that all na¬ 
tional differences are in principle annulled in the church 
and in the expectation of the coming again of the Lord. 

(a) The Unity of the Human Race. Every exposition 
of scriptural teaching about nations and nationality must 
start from the basic conception of the unity of mankind. 
Everything, of course, depends on making it quite clear 
what constitutes the special character of this basic concep¬ 
tion of the Scriptures regarding the unity of the human 
race. Its basis is theocentric: One God, one Creator, one 
Lord of the world, and therefore also one humanity. This 
starting point differs entirely from the idea of the unifica¬ 
tion of mankind effected by means of some universal or¬ 
ganization of humanity. For all statements about the 
unity of the human race are based on the biblical accounts 
of the creation. These accounts express with particular 
clearness the idea that from God’s point of view mankind 
is essentially one — a view which was later adopted and 
developed as a self-evident scriptural truth in the Psalms 
and the historical books of the Old Testament as well as in 
the apostolic writings of the New Testament. From the 
point of view of man the situation may, of course, appear 
very different. But man’s intellect alone is of itself unable 
to grasp this divinely appointed state of things, for men’s 
minds either tend toward the international activism of the 
humanitarian, who would deny the differences among 
nations, or they tend to deify nationality after the manner 
of the nationalist, who exaggerates the differences that exist 
among nations. The Bible, on the other hand, maintains 
the fundamental view that the unity of the human race 


Church and Community 


98 

is a self-evident corollary of the belief in one God, the 
Creator and Sovereign of the world. 

Thence follows a specific interpretation of its history. 
It is one of the special merits of the Old Testament, com¬ 
pared with the records of other religions, that it presents a 
coherent view of history. The classical example of this is 
found in the prophetic books of the Old Testament. The 
Old Testament prophets, who were well aware of the dif¬ 
ferences among nations, both in character and historical 
development, nevertheless bore striking testimony before 
the nation to the essential unity of their destiny, with re¬ 
markable courage considering their situation. To the 
prophets the diversity existing among nations did not ap¬ 
pear as mere casual juxtaposition, each nation pursuing its 
own historical path independently of the others, but they 
addressed their message to all nations, including their own 
people, as being bound in one common destiny prepared 
for them by the one God, Sovereign of the world and of 
all nations and of history. It needs no elaborate proof to 
show that such a conception of history lifted Old Testa¬ 
ment prophecy far above contemporaneous interpreta¬ 
tions of history. Indeed it has quite rightly been hailed as 
the fount and origin of all the more profound conceptions 
of history, and the high place among ancient historical 
documents accorded to the historical accounts given in the 
books of Samuel and Kings is also due to the fact that their 
authors were able to perceive, amid the diversity of na¬ 
tional destinies, the underlying unity of all historical fate. 
The idea of the unity of the human race has, therefore, 
very far-reaching consequences. 

This doctrine of the fundamental unity of the human 
race finds particularly clear expression in all those pas¬ 
sages which emphasize the fundamental limitations of 
Hebrew national consciousness. As is well known, one of 


Hanns Lilje 99 

the most interesting and illuminating phenomena of the 
history of religions consists precisely in the decisiveness 
with which, just when the religious history of the Israelites 
reaches its highest levels, Israel’s claim to national abso¬ 
lutism is most resolutely opposed . 2 “ Are ye not as chil¬ 
dren of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith 
the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land 
of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syri¬ 
ans from Kir? ” That is to say, the national history of 
Israel follows the same uniform plan which God pursues 
with the human race, wherein all nations have their place, 
Israel as well as all the others. This view becomes espe¬ 
cially significant when one keeps clearly in mind the 
uniqueness imparted to the Old Testament people of God 
in the divine plan of redemption. When speaking of the 
divinely appointed redemptive mission of Israel, it is im¬ 
portant that this should not be confused with any national 
excellence. Israel possesses no special place among the 
nations in virtue of its history; for other nations also are 
subject to the Lord. The uniqueness and special character 
of the Old Testament people of God rests on one fact 
alone, which cannot be explained by the natural origins 
of Israel, the fact namely that the people of Israel were 
specially chosen and called to be the vehicle of God’s revela¬ 
tion to man. But this is not a purely natural fact, nor is it 
an attribute of the national and political existence of Israel. 

This is plainly stated in all those passages describing the 
fulfilment of God’s uniform plan for the history of the 
world among the non-Israelitic or “ heathen ” nations. It 
is equally unique in the history of religion that in the Old 
Testament the divine will, as operative in the history of 
nations, is described as using other nations and their lead¬ 
ing personalities with the same sovereign freedom as it 
2 Amos 9:7. 


ioo Church and Community 

does Israel. It can thus come about that a king of foreign 
origin, like Cyrus, can actually be called “ the anointed of 
the Lord,” that is a messiah, because he fulfills a special 
divine purpose in the history of nations. 8 Concrete politi¬ 
cal history must, therefore, testify that God has only one 
uniform plan for the world which presupposes the funda¬ 
mental unity of mankind. As is well known, this line of 
thought, begun in the prophetic books of the Old Testa¬ 
ment, is carried on right through to the apocalyptic books 
of the New Testament, including the synoptic as well as 
the Johannine writings. The destiny of the nations of the 
world is a coherent unity: all nations have a place in God’s 
plan, however different their historical development may 
be in detail. The unity of the human race follows there¬ 
fore from the divine ruling of the world, which, according 
to the Bible, will continue to the end of history. 

(b) The Multiplicity of Nations. The fact that, ac¬ 
cording to the Scriptures, the unity of the human race is 
not the result of human speculation or of human organiza¬ 
tion but results from God’s uniform rule over the world, 
finds striking corroboration in the fact that the diversity 
of nations is never denied, neither their varied origin, 
their different character, nor their different historical des¬ 
tiny. On the contrary, the multiplicity and variety of na¬ 
tions is recognized as a fact in accordance with the will of 
God. 

The fact that there are many nations is dependent on 
God’s creative will and on his sovereignty over history. 
The locus classicus scripturae for this is Acts 17:26, where 
the general biblical view is summed up, namely, that the 
entire fate of nations — that is, not only their natural 
existence, but their historical development and their 
course throughout the whole of world history — rests on 

a Isa. 45:1. 


lOl 


Hanns Lilje 

the will of God, the Creator. Just as the existence of na¬ 
tions points to God their creator, so the continual shaping 
of the destinies of nations points to the creati continua. 

A realistic study of biblical teaching prohibits any ex¬ 
planation of the existence of nations merely as an “ order of 
creation.” This idea, if indeed it has any place in biblical 
thought, can certainly not be applied to the continued 
existence of nations. For if one attempted to explain the 
nations of the world, in all their variety, as the expression 
of a divine order of creation (neglecting for the moment 
any examination of the concept itself), it would imply 
that humanity had received directly from God its national 
differences. But such an idea is unsupported by any exe- 
getical statement. There exists no text in the Bible au¬ 
thorizing the view that the existence of nations is the 
immediate consequence of God’s creation. Such an in¬ 
terpretation of the Bible first arose from a conception 
which originated in the Romantic school and was inci¬ 
dentally, although inaccurately, ascribed to Luther. The 
Bible text itself gives no support to such a view. 

On the other hand, it would, of course, be equally false 
to base an explanation of the multiplicity of nations solely 
on the story of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11). Careful 
exegesis will only permit one to state with certainty that 
in the Bible the existence of different nations in the world 
is mentioned only after the flood. The fact of this di¬ 
versity in the world of nations is, therefore, fully admitted 
without any other dogmatic explanation of it being offered 
except that it is in accordance with the will of God. 

The importance of the story of the tower of Babel really 
lies in its drawing attention to the limitations which cir¬ 
cumscribe all national life. Differences in language and in 
the historical development of nations obviously result in 
an immediate curtailment of the original unity of the hu- 


102 


Church and Community 


man race. It is represented as the result of human guilt, 
and therefore the multiplicity of nations is in fact an ex¬ 
pression of man’s fallen status. This is shown by the fact 
that differences in language, that finest instrument of the 
national genius, represent not only an enrichment of life 
(as taught by Goethe, who borrowed the idea from 
Herder, who in his turn derived it from Hamann), but 
also form an additional burden, nay, even a threat to the 
existence of any true community among nations. On the 
other hand, this tale of the building of the tower of Babel 
bears witness to the fact that in spite of a clear recognition 
of the differences existing among nations, the essential 
unity of the human race must not, in principle, be lost. 

The biblical view of the differences that separate na¬ 
tions differs, therefore, in essence from any exclusively 
national or international conception. It is on a completely 
different plane. In order to make this clear, attention may 
be drawn to two considerations: 

The difference lies first in the realism of the Bible. The 
difference in national development, which is the result of 
a difference in national destiny, is such an unmistakable 
fact that not to recognize it would be sheer delusion. 
The existence of different nations is, therefore, taken for 
granted throughout the whole of the Bible. The locus 
classicus scripturae in Acts 17:26, to which we have already 
referred, is not the only proof of this realism which accepts 
the differences among nations and their development, but 
a striking piece of evidence in its support can also be found 
in the emphatic manner in which St. Paul stresses his own 
national origin. 4 

Still more decisive, however, is that other fundamental 
biblical conception, namely that of the special klesis or 
vocation, which man may not deny, alter or annul. The 
4 E.g., Rom. 9:3; Phil. 3:5. 


Hanns Lilje 103 

Pauline doctrine (1 Cor. 7) that every man must remain in 
his klesis, his “ calling,” should without doubt also apply 
to the attitude of the individual toward his nation. There 
can be no doubt that the Paul who counseled the slave to 
remain a slave and not seek emancipation would say the 
same of membership of a nation. The energy and warmth 
with which he speaks of his own nationality is striking 
proof of this. The oft-quoted text in Gal. 3:28, “ There is 
neither Jew nor Greek,” means, as the context proves 
beyond a shadow of doubt, simply this: that differences of 
nationality, class and sex are, on principle, annulled 
through fellowship in Christ, but for that very reason they 
remain valid in actual practice. Only with this proviso has 
St. Paul’s statement any real meaning; to use it in the sense 
of an organizational measure is to misuse it. 

From all this it follows that the Bible recognizes and 
takes into account the distinctive characteristics of nations 
and of nationality. 

(c) The Double Limitation of Nationality. Again, 
the fact that the Bible fully admits the absolute reality of 
nation and nationality becomes quite clear when one 
traces the limits which it lays down to nationality. In this 
connection two things are important. Nowhere in the 
Bible is nationality given absolute value. Nowhere is any 
final or definitive value ascribed to the fact of nationality, 
but it is always looked upon as forming only a part of a 
larger, historical divine order. It is however of supreme 
importance to recognize quite clearly the characteristic 
limits which the Bible sets to nationality. The very pecu¬ 
liarity of this limitation shows once again very clearly the 
importance which is ascribed to nationality itself. 

Just as there is no scriptural authority for idolizing the 
nation, so the fact of nationality may not be disregarded. 
Neither the one nor the other attitude is compatible with 


Church and Community 


104 

scriptural teaching. For the limits which the Bible sets to 
nationality cannot be used for the purposes of political 
organization in the sense of erecting a political system 
which would deny the idea of nationality. For these limits 
are the expression of a faith which exists on a plane other 
than that of politics. 

The first limitation imposed on the conception of na¬ 
tionality is due to the factual existence of the church. 
Even the Old Testament indicates unequivocally that 
“ God’s people ” may also be chosen from among other 
nations if the original people of God, namely Israel, should 
forfeit their calling and election. That precisely is the 
meaning of Amos 9:7. Everywhere where reference is 
made to the fact that salvation shall come to the “ peoples ” 
and the “ islands,” reference is made to the same funda¬ 
mental idea that the national boundaries of Israel are 
transcended. 

But this idea does not attain full development until we 
come to the New Testament conception of the church. 
The ekklesia consists of those who are called out of this 
world, out of this aidn. This divine calling transcends 
the limits of all nationality. The old aidn has been over¬ 
come in principle, and for the church the laws of the new 
aidn are already in operation, as stated in the well known 
passage in Galatians 3:28. For the church, the multiplicity 
of nations no longer represents a barrier. On the contrary, 
it is emphatically stated that the wall of partition between 
Jews and heathen has been broken down (Eph. 2:14). 
The fact that membership of this church no longer takes 
any account of national barriers is an essential part of the 
biblical conception of the church. It should, however, be 
kept firmly in mind that the church transcends these bar¬ 
riers in just the same way as she transcends class barriers. 
As matters of historical fact their validity remains; just as 
a slave does not cease to be a slave by becoming a Christian, 


Hanns Lilje 105 

so a Greek does not cease to be a Greek when he becomes a 
Christian. The whole of the New Testament bears con¬ 
vincing witness to this state of things. The fact that the 
language of the New Testament was Greek and not He¬ 
brew is striking evidence of the fundamental transforma¬ 
tion undergone by the original national Jewish character 
of the mother church. On the other hand, the New Testa¬ 
ment itself testifies how slowly and with how much diffi¬ 
culty this process was realized, and makes it clear that the 
new position of the church was not achieved merely by an 
external, organized effort to overcome the originally Jew¬ 
ish character of the primitive church, but sprang from an 
entirely different conception of the nature of all reality. 
The invalidation of national frontiers by the church is a 
matter of faith and not of political organization. 

The second still more decisive cause of the invalidation 
of national frontiers rests in the eschatological expecta¬ 
tions of early Christianity. An obvious result of the ex¬ 
pectation of the consummation of the Kingdom of God 
would be that the fundamental principles underlying the 
previous dispensation (including national differences) 
would be abolished by the second coming of Christ. In 
view of the expectation of the end of the world the fate of 
the various nations, in all their diversity of culture and 
history, was seen in the light of the great day of the second 
coming of Jesus Christ, when the destiny of the world 
would be fulfilled and the congregation of the faithful 
would be gathered in from among Jews and Gentiles. It 
follows from this line of thought, which was plainly of 
such fundamental importance for early Christianity, that 
the invalidation of national barriers did not rest on any 
politically organized will, but was an act of faith, function¬ 
ing on a plane superior to that of historical and political 
life. 

The modern Christian interpretation of nationality 


io6 Church and Community 

must not lose sight of these fundamental principles laid 
down in the Bible, and they should moreover provide a 
practical guide to our present-day attitude to the nation 
and to nationality. 

The fundamentals of our understanding of nationality 
as developed above will obviously assume a completely 
new aspect when considered in this context. This applies 
first to the question of the origin of the nation. The two¬ 
fold character of nationality, described above, resulting 
from the interplay of natural conditions and historical 
development, the combination of which we have said 
creates a nation, corresponds in Christian thought with 
the double reference to the creative activity of God and to 
his supremacy over history. 

As far as the Christian is concerned, the natural condi¬ 
tions of nationality must point to God, the Creator. This 
is already implicit in the fact that nationality cannot be 
conceived in terms of an “ order of creation.” Such a con¬ 
ception, originating in the theology of the nineteenth 
century, is in any case, owing to its ambiguity and com¬ 
plexity, open to suspicion. But even if, instead of this, the 
more precise concept of the ordinationes Dei taken from 
the Lutheran creeds is adopted, this may nevertheless not 
be applied to nations in the sense that they are the product 
of an original divine ordinance. The Lutheran creeds 
recognize only three original ordinationes Dei: matrimo- 
nium (marriage and family); auctoritas (political au¬ 
thority) ; ministerium verbi (the office of preaching); and 
it is as well to stick to these admirably clear fundamental 
categories, for they form the cornerstones of the triangle 
of divine basic conditions of human life, and only in obedi¬ 
ence to them can life be lived according to the will of God. 

Nationality, however, is not identical with any of these 
fundamental categories, but it is quite obviously related 


Hanns Lilje 107 

to all three. It is evident that by its origin it is indissolubly 
connected with the first of these divine basic ordinances, 
namely, the family. Its common origin in blood relation¬ 
ship and the continual biological renewal of a nation 
through family life is the most obvious proof of its con¬ 
nection with the divine order. Without such an origin it 
would be impossible to speak of a nation; it forms the 
elementary condition of its existence. To this extent a 
nation is palpably and incontrovertibly the product of the 
creative activity of God. That the continuity of human 
history is incessantly maintained and that even the most 
terrible disasters in human society are unable either to 
interrupt or to abolish the cycle of birth and death, proves 
that God’s sustaining and regenerating creative power is 
ceaselessly at work in this his first divine and basic ordi¬ 
nance, namely, the family. From it the nations derive 
their physical life, and their existence literally depends on 
this ordinance of God. There are few such literal proofs 
of the validity of God’s ordinances in the world as the fact 
that nations receive their death warrant at the precise mo¬ 
ment when they begin to disregard this divine ordinance; 
transgressing the fourth and sixth commandments of the 
Decalogue (according to the Lutheran system of number¬ 
ing) has always been one of the decisive factors in national 
decay, as can easily be proved. 

Christian faith also sees in the other natural conditions 
of national existence an equally clear reference to the 
Creator. Not only the historical dwelling-place of a na¬ 
tion with its geographical and climatic character, but also 
the racial type and constitution of a people testify to the 
sovereignty of God the Creator “ who has made me and all 
the world and still sustains me.” The first duty of Chris¬ 
tian thinking on the nature of nationality is to point to 
these facts and to show that the natural conditions of all 


108 Church and Community 

national life are the expression of God’s creative power. 
It is not a matter of indifference for a nation whether it 
is aware that its very physical existence is a secret proof of 
the sovereignty of God. 

Quite the most decisive sign of the connection linking 
national existence with God is provided by the historical 
fate of nations. The course of the history of nations testi¬ 
fies in a unique manner to the sovereignty of God — 
that is, his position as Lord of the world. And that is 
why it is precisely here that Christian faith comes into 
closest contact with the reality of nationality. Whenever 
Christian teaching places this point of contact in a clear 
and true light it makes an incomparable contribution to 
the understanding of nationality as compared with other 
theories of nationality. For the Christian testimony 
amounts to nothing less than the assertion that the “ call ” 
or “ mission,” in virtue of which a nation first gains real 
historical character and eminence, manifests God’s deal¬ 
ings with that nation. The restrained apostolic language 
of the New Testament expresses this in Acts 17:26: “ He 
hath determined the times before appointed and the 
bounds of their habitation.” 

It must be clearly stated at the outset that this relation 
does not justify the naive assumption that God’s guidance 
can be claimed for any and every individual happening in 
the life of a nation. It would be a false and naive inter¬ 
pretation of this scriptural and universally experienced 
Christian doctrine to suppose that any and every “ great ” 
event in the life of a nation can be directly referred to 
God. The idea expressed by this concept is rather that, 
inasmuch as God is the ruler of history, he is also ruler 
over the historical development of nations. This rule 
of God, that is, the fact that he is the ruler, can also express 
itself in history in secret ways. According to Lutheran 


Hanns Lilje 109 

doctrine, God may manifest his sovereignty just as much 
in the abasement of a nation as in its historical rise, just 
as much when he calls a nation into historical being as 
when he banishes it from the stage of history. 

According to Christian faith, the great fundamental 
secret of nationality, namely, its mission or “ calling,” can¬ 
not be really understood except on the basis of the Chris¬ 
tian understanding of life. 

The root importance of klesis or “ calling ” in the entire 
sociological philosophy of Christianity has already been 
mentioned. It is just as impossible for a Christian arbi¬ 
trarily to change his nationality as it would be to alter at 
will the state appointed by God for each individual in 
his everyday life, such as being slave or freeman, man or 
woman. Our nationality has been given to us, just as 
much as our “ call ” to be man or woman, bond or free. 
However, there is yet another, deeper meaning contained 
in the idea of “ calling,” namely, that not only is each 
individual called to a special state, but that it is God him¬ 
self from whom the call comes. The recognition of this 
fact is of decisive importance for the historical existence 
of a people. 

We have referred above to the mystery that shrouds 
the historical birth of a nation, a mystery which transcends 
any merely rational explanation. Christian faith sees the 
explanation of this mystery in the fact that it is God, the 
Lord of History (as well as of our natural life), who calls 
a people. By the very fact of his calling he endows a na¬ 
tion with existence and a place in the world of nations. 
It is possible that theologically this is the only fundamental 
doctrine that can be laid down about nationality, namely, 
that a nation receives its mission from the hands of God. 
It owes its natural foundations, without which its exist¬ 
ence as a people would be impossible, to the Creator; and 


1 io 


Church and Community 


it owes its historical “ call,” without which its full histori¬ 
cal existence would be impossible, to the Lord of History. 
This “ call ” lasts as long as God sees fit to allow. Therein 
lies an exact parallel to the Christian conception of man. 
According to the teaching of the Bible, an individual only 
attains complete humanity when called by God, who 
thereby adds to his merely creaturely existence mental and 
spiritual life. The eternally new creative activity of God 
transforms man from a member of the world of creatures 
to a member of the Kingdom of God (II Cor. 4:6). Pre¬ 
cisely the same happens with nations. Full national exist¬ 
ence only begins for a nation at that moment in time when 
God, by endowing it with a special historical mission, lifts 
it from prehistory into history. The existence, therefore, 
of every nation, consciously pursuing its historical calling 
and mission, is a testimony to the sovereign rule of God. 
The second great duty of Christian teaching consists, there¬ 
fore, in testifying to this fact. This conviction is the axis 
on which rests the whole Christian view of nationality. 

It must, of course, be immediately added that this view 
cannot be upheld in an exclusive or naive spirit. Neither 
the birth of a nation through the creative will of God, nor 
the consciousness of its calling, can be used superficially 
as a means of self-glorification. The factual existence of a 
people can only be understood, in the light of Christian 
belief, by insisting on the fundamental distinction which 
the Reformation drew between lex and evangelium. This 
fundamental distinction means that the will of God only 
reaches us under this double and always interdependent 
aspect, namely, both as law and as gospel. It is one and 
the same action of God, cvily operating in a different man¬ 
ner; there is only one encounter between God and man, 
but the manner in waich he deals with men varies. God’s 
dealings with mankind under the law — his opus alienum 


11 


Hanns Lilje i 

— occur in hidden ways through the mediation of his 
creatures and of the natural ordinances of this world; 
God’s dealings with men under the gospel — his opus 
proprium — take place in the clear light of his revelation 
in Jesus Christ. According to the doctrine of the Reform¬ 
ers the one mode of activity cannot be preached without 
the other; the preaching of the law without the gospel 
leads to legalism; the preaching of the gospel without the 
law leads to false spiritualism. 

Applied to nationality, this fundamental attitude of the 
Reformation means that nations also should always be 
considered under this double aspect. According to the 
law of God, a nation is a people in whom God’s natural 
ordinances are at work; God’s will expressed in law is 
shown by the clear and inviolable ordinances which gov¬ 
ern the life of nations. But national life is also subject to 
“ the law of sin and death ” (Rom. 8:2); i.e., the burden 
of mortality — for nations may die — and the burden of 
guilt — for even great nations may become perverted and 
corrupt. Inasmuch as the lives of nations are subject 
to the law of God, man is led to recognize that the life of 
the nation is also subject to sin and change, and that it 
must seek the power of the forgiveness and resurrection 
of Christ. 

But the preaching of the gospel in the life of a people 
implies that above the natural order, in which God’s re¬ 
demptive will is “ hidden ” under the law, the redemptive 
will of God is also ceaselessly at work gathering his own 
from among all nations and therefore in this particular 
nation also gathering his elect, for whom his ordinances 
have spiritual validity, who hold the faith in obedience to 
him and who are confirmed therein by his blessing. 

The great importance of this doctrine of the law and 
the gospel in the life of a people is that it enables the 


112 


Church and Community 


church and Christians to adopt an attitude to nationality 
that is in accordance with the facts of the case. It prevents 
Christian moralism which tries to impose the spiritual 
structure of the communities of early Christians directly 
and immediately on the everyday life of nations. “ It is 
not a question of a Christian state and Christian civiliza¬ 
tion, but of a true state and a genuine civilization.” 6 

This gives a definite answer to the question as to what 
the relationship between church and nation should actu¬ 
ally be. 

It is one of the peculiarities of the period of the Ref¬ 
ormation, that the revival of the church was almost uni¬ 
versally associated with a reawakening of national con¬ 
sciousness. This process is apparent in the whole of 
European history, but was especially marked in the his¬ 
tory of the German Reformation. The sixteenth century, 
like the later Reformation period in other countries, is 
characterized by the fact that the mother tongue plays a 
leading part in the proclamation of the new gospel. The 
noblest instrument of national consciousness thereby be¬ 
came the vehicle for the encounter of church and people. 
This has happened again and again in the history of the 
mission field. Tribes which had hitherto only had a pre¬ 
historic or subhistorical existence often attained full na¬ 
tional consciousness only when they received a translation 
of the Bible in their own language; and it has often hap¬ 
pened that the creation of a Christian vocabulary of their 
own in catechism and hymnbook has coincided with the 
first blossoming of an autochthonous literature. 

In spite of all this, the Lutheran Reformation has firmly 
and consistently maintained that the existence of the 
church is in no way bound up with any particular so¬ 
ciological or historical structure. The only essential 

5 Fr. Brunstadt, " Gesetz und Evangelium,” in Kirche, Volk und Staat, 
(ed. Gerstermaier, Berlin, Furche-Verlag) p. 53. 


Hanns Lilje 113 

foundation for the church is the presence of Jesus Christ 
in the Scripture and the sacraments. The nature of any 
particular nation is not therefore decisive for the existence 
of the church of Christ. By stating this principle Luther’s 
Reformation maintained the integrity of the church. But 
the Reformation also expressed its conviction that the 
church would only reach its fullest practical development 
by becoming a national church. For the church does not 
attain its full development by assuming the character of 
an international universal organization, but only inas¬ 
much as it preaches the gospel to the nations in their own 
language. The Word of God can only become truly ef¬ 
fective when preached in a language “ understanded of 
the people.” By insisting on the rightful importance of a 
national church the true ecumenical nature of the church 
was at the same time safeguarded. For it was thereby 
made clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ must, in fact, be 
preached to every nation, and that the church’s position as 
a national church was not of fundamental importance for 
the existence of the church itself. It receives its univer¬ 
sality from Jesus Christ himself and from nothing else. 
The church therefore in its relations with the nation al¬ 
ways does two things: it penetrates the nature of the people 
to the last fibers of its being in order to understand the 
national life from the point of view of God’s ordinances 
and to preach the gospel of Christ in a manner suited to 
its genius; but at the same time it makes it clear that this 
its gospel is entirely independent of the nature of the na¬ 
tion in question, that it cannot receive its justification at 
the hands of the nation and is not called upon to justify 
itself to the nation. For the gospel is the gospel of the 
Lord, by whom and in whom all peoples live and receive 
their historical calling and in whom all peoples will find 
their salvation. 

The question of the organized form of the church within 


Church and Community 


114 

a nation is entirely independent of this. What sociological 
type of church should exist in any nation, whether an 
established church or a free church, is a matter of external 
historical tradition, which may well be of decisive impor¬ 
tance for a country’s history, but not for its church. If the 
church of Jesus Christ has once taken root in a country, it 
is as a rule a matter of life or death if this nation separates 
itself again from the church of Jesus Christ. But this 
would not in any way alter the mission of the church to 
that people. It must bear witness to the fact that the in¬ 
dividual has received his membership of a nation in ac¬ 
cordance with the will of God; that the nation must recog¬ 
nize that it has received its calling from God and that it 
must work out its destiny in obedience to God’s ordi¬ 
nances; and that the church’s function in the nation is to 
preach the law and the gospel whereon depends the salva¬ 
tion of the individual as well as the salvation of nations. 


THE IDEA OF A NATIONAL CHURCH 

by 

Manfred Bjorkquist 









THE IDEA OF A NATIONAL CHURCH 


i 

At the beginning of the present century a new movement 
arose within the Church of Sweden. The aim of this 
movement was to renew and deepen the essential nature 
of the character and calling of the Swedish national 
church. Its watchword, “ The Swedish people — a people 
of God,” expressed the essence of the idea of a national 
church, a conception which was treasured by the younger 
generation in the Swedish Church of that day as an ideal 
of great promise. 

If this watchword is to be rightly understood, however, 
we must bear in mind that it was intended to express not 
merely an ideal or a vision of the future, but the deepest 
purpose of the Church of Sweden at the present time. 
This church was regarded as an incarnation of the idea of 
a national church. The whole history of the Swedish 
Church seemed to support this view. At the same time it 
was felt by the leaders of this movement that the idea of a 
national church constituted an ideal which could only be 
realized through much labor and struggle. In the midst of 
a historical process, with its constant changes, the church 
is continually involved in new situations and confronted 
by new demands. The effort to interpret these situations 
prophetically and to meet these demands compels her to 
a constant endeavor to realize her true nature, her inmost 
purpose. Therefore, as has frequently been suggested, the 
idea of the church will always be a “ militant ” idea. It 


n8 Church and Community 

includes a constant challenge to the activity of the church. 
A militant national church blazes the trail for the true life 
of the nation, but an apathetic, inactive national church 
is simply a repellent caricature of a Christian church. A 
living, militant national church is always characterized by 
great tension, just because its vocation is so high, its task 
so great. The life of the whole nation, in all its variety and 
richness, is intimately connected with the life of the 
church. That is why a living national church must be 
ever seeking for the grace of God; it is constantly com¬ 
pelled to seek for divine forgiveness and divine strength. 

What then is the deepest meaning of this idea of a na¬ 
tional church? What right has a national church to call 
itself a Christian church? 

It is not the character of its members but its distinctive 
message which makes a national church a Christian com¬ 
munity. From the religious point of view the theological 
argument which supports the idea of a national church 
starts from the concept of prevenient and universal divine 
grace. The national church is the agent which proclaims 
the free, prevenient, and universal grace of God. But it 
is more than this: the national church itself — as a com¬ 
munity— is, by its very existence, a gospel. All over 
Sweden the white churches stand out in the countryside as 
a testimony to the Christian gospel. Man comes into 
touch with the church at all the great moments of human 
life. From the cradle to the grave the national church 
overarches the struggles and vicissitudes of human life 
with the celestial rainbow of divine grace. 

The very existence of the church constitutes a proclama¬ 
tion of prevenient grace. It witnesses to the truth that 
God seeks man before man begins to seek God: God is 
first at the trysting place. The national church proclaims 
this truth first and foremost by the rite of baptism, which 


Manfred Bjorkquist lig 

is the sacrament par excellence for this kind of church. 
As one of our own writers puts it: 

The one thing we know about every person in our country 
— and, strictly speaking, this is the only thing we know — is 
this: that he too is included in the grace of God, that divine 
grace does not wait for him to take the initiative, but that the 
first step is always taken by God himself. It is our desire, there¬ 
fore, that the moment anyone begins to think about God, the 
moment his first faint longing for God has been awakened, he 
should be able to see and know that God thought about him 
long ago, that God has been longing for him all the time, and 
that his own desire for God is due to the fact that God is seek¬ 
ing him. This is why we christen our children. 1 

The fact that the national church exists also constitutes 
the proclamation of universal grace. In principle the 
national church includes the whole nation. A man may 
deliberately withdraw from the external communion of 
the national church, but the national church — like a 
spiritual mother — can never cease to feel responsible for 
those who have left the outward community. The na¬ 
tional church is and remains the spiritual home of the 
nation, and just as no one can really cut himself off from 
the love and the prayer and the responsibility of his own 
family, so no one can ever really sever his connection with 
the church in its love and care and sense of responsibility 
for all its children. The national church is a living and per¬ 
petual messenger, proclaiming, in intention at least, the 
divine call to everyone within the borders of the country. 
The national church asserts — by its very existence — that 
every man and woman born into the nation is invited to 
enter the Kingdom of God. In this age, which is known 
as the “ day of grace,” the gates of the Kingdom of God 
are open to all. Hence the national church includes all 
within its borders, the criminal in prison as well as the 
i E. Billing. 


120 


Church and Community 


good churchman who, in all sincerity, is faithful to his re¬ 
ligious profession. Every single human being is absolutely 
dependent upon the grace of God; no one to whom it is 
offered ever deserves it in the least; it is entirely unmerited. 
This grace ought to be offered to every human being; the 
responsibility for making this possible rests upon the na¬ 
tional church. Thus the national church itself constitutes 
a protest against the idea that Christianity is only intended 
to meet the spiritual needs of certain kinds of people. Di¬ 
vine sonship does not depend upon the possession of a 
certain kind of religious disposition which would make 
“ piety ” a special characteristic of people of a certain type. 
No, a national church proclaims that it is normal to live 
in communion with God. To live apart from God is ab¬ 
normal, it is not quite “ human.” This truth is urgently 
needed in these days when secularism is widespread and in 
so many quarters Christian life is barely tolerated as a 
quasi-private affair connected with certain groups, whose 
numbers — so it is said — are steadily declining. The 
national church maintains that God is not the private deity 
of certain groups. He is the creator of heaven and earth, 
the cause and the origin of all things, the Father of all 
souls. In him alone can the human heart find rest. 

Finally, the national church is an expression of the free 
grace of God. Although it is connected with the state it 
must not use the power of the state to win that which can 
only be gained by the grace with which it has been en¬ 
trusted. In this respect national churches have gradually 
freed themselves from dependence on those elements of 
authority which were formerly at their disposal simply be¬ 
cause they were national churches; these elements, indeed, 
were relics of a time when it was in the interest of the 
state that religious conformity should prevail. Although 
the right of free secession from the Swedish Church has 


Manfred Bjorkquist 121 

not yet been settled in a satisfactory way, the church itself, 
through its episcopate and its church assembly, has 
adopted this genuinely religious idea of a national church. 

11 

The message of the national church is primarily ad¬ 
dressed to individuals. The gospel is a message to them. It 
is as individuals that men and women enter the Kingdom of 
God. But at the present time we have gained a new and 
deeper insight into the reality of community. We have 
come to see that the individual cannot detach himself 
from various social relationships. It is true, of course, 
that God does communicate directly with the human soul, 
but any view of history and of man which takes all the fac¬ 
tors of life into account will naturally include considera¬ 
tion of all those relations which are so essential to per¬ 
sonality. The church, for instance, has never been able to 
ignore either family or national relationships. The na¬ 
tional church would indeed be the last to succumb to a 
superficial individualism. 

The presentation of the gospel to the individual, in 
such a way that it challenges him to decision, must of 
course be the first duty of a national church. Preaching 
of this kind, with its definite appeal to the individual soul, 
has not always been characteristic of the national church. 
But this duty should never be divorced from the church’s 
task of improving the social conditions under which peo¬ 
ple live. So far as the national Church of Sweden has been 
alive to its task it has always been interested in education 
— in the education of the individual as well as in the sys¬ 
tem of popular education. Here the point is that the 
church should try to create an atmosphere or a spiritual 
climate in which it is easier and more natural to present 
the gospel to individuals. 


122 


Church and Community 


The Church of Sweden has always been greatly inter¬ 
ested in schools and in the educational system as a whole. 
In front of the ancient university of Upsala there stands 
the statue of Archbishop Jacob Ulfsson, the founder of 
the university. In front of the oldest college building in 
Vasteras stands the statue of Bishop Johannes Rudbeck- 
ius, to whom Sweden owes her first grammar school, and 
in many an elementary school in Sweden the portrait of a 
former rector of the parish might be hung in a place of 
honor as the founder of the school. This interest in schools 
was, of course, first evoked by the desire to give a good reli¬ 
gious education, but it has extended to the educational 
system as a whole. The fact that the Church of Sweden — 
through special organs created for the purpose — is now 
cooperating in the valuable voluntary educational work 
which has been such a feature of modern Swedish life, is 
in full accordance with the best traditions of the Swedish 
Church. 

The interest of the national church, however, is not con¬ 
fined to the educational system. Like a good spiritual 
mother the church must pay great attention to the whole 
process by which a nation attains maturity and creates its 
own future. The form this feature will take can never be 
a matter of indifference to the church, for the church will 
itself take part in it and will bear a heavy share of responsi¬ 
bility for it. 

The influence of the church, in this respect, will be ex¬ 
tended primarily by its own living members who are at 
work within various spheres of social life. The national 
church must realize the Lutheran idea of “ the calling,” 
which regards all life and work as service offered to God 
in response to his call. The legislator, the social worker, 
the artist, and author, the journalist, the employer, the 
workman, should all feel that they are called to serve God 


Manfred Bjorkquist 123 

in their daily work. They cannot, it is true, reform the 
abuses connected with any process of work, but they can 
perform the work itself in a new spirit, and they can give it 
a new meaning; they may be able to inculcate Christian 
ideals in such a way that they will influence men’s attitude 
to the work in question and their estimate of its value. 
To some extent at least every sphere of work can be freed 
from that onesided and exaggerated view of its importance 
which so frequently happens in this age of specialization. 
For a sphere of activity may quite well be selfish; on the 
other hand it may form part of and help to serve a larger 
unity. For although the church cannot draw up a social 
program from the Christian point of view, valid for all 
periods in history, it can preach the gospel in such a way 
that all who work for the community in any way will be 
able to maintain the Christian idea of love and the Chris¬ 
tian demand for righteousness as a living reality; in so 
doing the church will be the secret leaven within all social 
activity and will also indicate the ultimate end toward 
which all man’s energies should be directed. Thus the 
type of life represented by a national church — for such a 
type does exist — is anxious to subject life as a whole to 
the guidance of the Spirit of the Word. All the conflicts 
of human existence are felt within its heart. Nothing that 
legitimately belongs to human life can ever be left outside. 

in 

Above all, the national church must act nobly and 
firmly; in her spiritual campaign she must be ever ready 
to take the initiative. Just as Christ perceived latent ca¬ 
pacities for God and for goodness within human beings, 
where others could scarcely detect any sign of good at all 
— as for example in the woman of Samaria — so should 
the church contemplate humanity with the keen eye of a 


Church and Community 


124 

watchful mother, ready to perceive possible openings for 
the gospel. The young professor, Nathan Soderblom, once 
remarked to a group of ordinands, “ As servants of Christ, 
you have an ally in every man.” The national church 
must never lose sight of the fact that in the course of the 
centuries the gospel of Christ has stamped its imprint upon 
the national life — upon its laws, its customs, its general 
outlook — far beyond the borders of the church itself. 
Our Christian heritage is larger than we suppose. What 
attitude, for instance, should the church adopt toward a 
great national movement? Should it be primarily criti¬ 
cal? No; first of all the church, under the guidance of the 
Spirit of God, must try to discover the truth which consti¬ 
tutes the vital principle of the movement; having done 
this, it must then support this truth. It must act pastorally 
on a large scale by compelling a movement of this kind to 
face and realize its own truth, to be conscious of its deepest 
and ultimate purpose. This is a noble spiritual campaign. 
In this way the church will be the spiritually unifying force 
within the nation. The church will thus help to set move¬ 
ments free from corporate selfishness and to educate them 
for the service of the community. It is only from a posi¬ 
tive point of view of this kind that the church, when it is 
asked, can pronounce a fitting judgment. For in all the 
judgments passed by the church there must be something 
of the spirit of the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost sheep 
with sorrow and love in his heart. The church must wage 
a redeeming and victorious warfare. It must not first of 
all take defensive action; it must launch an offensive against 
evil in all forms, and it must fight for the realization of the 
divine purpose within the nation. 

The church, must fight nobly, not only in support of 
movements within the life of the nation, but for the nation 
itself. “ May God bring peace to the soul of Sweden.” 2 
2 J. A. Eklund. 


Manfred Bjorkquist 125 

Here we enter a sphere which is full of danger, where the 
“ narrow way ” which “ leadeth unto life ” skirts danger¬ 
ous bypaths. But the national church cannot be indiffer¬ 
ent to the historical calling of the nation. In its corporate 
capacity possibly it has no prophetic mission to guide the 
nation. The Lord of History will raise up prophets in his 
own good time. But the national church has a task to ful¬ 
fill in this sphere; it should so foster the spiritual life of this 
particular people and so proclaim the truth of the gospel 
within the life of the nation, that the people may be helped 
to distinguish the false prophets and leaders from the true, 
and may be able to discern its true vocation. Above all, 
the church must do its utmost to prevent the nation from 
indulging in self-glorification and even in national idola¬ 
try, a consummation which is reached when a nation re¬ 
gards its own welfare, its own glory and power as its su¬ 
preme right, its supreme purpose and its supreme good. 
As the national church takes an earnest and responsible 
part in national life it becomes its duty and its right 
to use its powers wisely in the education of the nation 
for the cause of world-wide brotherhood. Education of 
this kind is the principal contribution the church can make 
to the cause of world peace. “ The nations are archangels, 
created to execute the commands of God, every tribe and 
every people in accordance with its gifts and its calling.” 3 

It is evident that in order to fulfill its task as an educator 
of the people, the national church must remain above 
party conflict. It must not be a class church, nor be en¬ 
gaged in the political struggle for power. By an impartial 
attitude only can it keep the way open for its message in 
every direction. 

It is also obvious that the far-reaching and immense task 
of the church demands all the activity which church peo¬ 
ple can mobilize. In this respect the cooperation of lay- 
3 F. N. Soderblom. 


126 


Church and Community 


men is needed everywhere. The national church must not 
be merely a church of ecclesiastics. Besides the work which 
is regulated by law, there is great need for voluntary effort. 
In a rather fortunate way the Swedish Church has been 
able to combine the legally established and the voluntary 
aspects of church life. Besides a church assembly, in the 
course of the last half century, and convocations of clergy, 
chapters, episcopates (all established by law), the church 
has created several organs for the direction of its voluntary 
work. Thus the church assembly appoints central boards 
of missions, foreign and home missions, and a committee 
for the missions to seamen. Diocesan conventions, not es¬ 
tablished by law, are held in the dioceses, which appoint 
diocesan councils for the direction of voluntary work, etc. 
Recently the various chapters have been reorganized, and 
in addition to the duties they have discharged hitherto, 
they have been entrusted with the task “ of promoting 
Christian service to the poor, and youth work in the dio¬ 
cese.” If possible, this is to be carried out in cooperation 
with voluntary organizations. Here we see the close con¬ 
nection between the activities established by law and vol¬ 
untary effort. 

The Swedish national church is closely connected with 
the state. Such a relation can, of course, offer valuable 
possibilities for reaching the whole nation with the mes¬ 
sage of the church. So long as the church is allowed all 
necessary freedom, the importance of this connection with 
the state must not be underestimated. But in principle 
the national church does not need to be a state church. It 
may be conceived that this cooperation may be bought at 
too high a price. At this time, when the power of the state 
is increasing, the church must follow this development with 
extreme vigilance, and must maintain its claim for neces¬ 
sary independence. 


MANFRED BjORKQUIST 127 

The idea of the church which has here been set forth is 
not easy to realize in this age of secularization. There is 
always the danger that a national church with ancient tra¬ 
ditions and an outward stable and unified position may 
easily forget that it must also be a missionary church. It 
has indeed a sphere of missionary effort within its own bor¬ 
ders. It has the extremely difficult twofold vocation to be 
both a national church and a missionary church. 

If Christianity itself is a daring phenomenon within the 
world, Christianity in the form of a national church is still 
more audacious. But is it not a fact that as things are, a 
daring faith alone has any hope of success? In Sweden 
many churchmen are asking themselves: Can we really 
speak of the present situation in terms of a “ choice ”? 
Must not our campaign envisage the nation as a whole if 
victory is ever to be achieved? 

When we think of the history of the national Church of 
Sweden a phrase from the Scriptures springs into new life: 
“ The gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.” 






















NATION AND CHURCH IN THE 
ORTHODOX LANDS OF EASTERN 
EUROPE 


by 

Stefan Zankov 







NATION AND CHURCH IN THE ORTHODOX 
LANDS OF EASTERN EUROPE 


1 . INTRODUCTION 

The nations in the Orthodox East have arisen, histori¬ 
cally, in the closest connection with the Orthodox Church. 
However, no generally acknowledged (ecumenically in¬ 
stituted) and specific teaching exists in this church which 
defines either the relation between church and nation, or 
what the nation is. 

In the Orthodox East this problem has come to the fore 
only in the most recent times. From the beginning down 
to the present moment, the development of the problem 
has run along much the same lines as in the West. In the 
East, however, we may note some important peculiarities. 
The Christian West pays greater attention to “ the world ” 
(to history, culture, community life, to the practical tasks 
of Christianity in social life) than the Christian East. The 
latter is far more concerned with the “ beyond,” with the 
“ mystical ” element. From this standpoint, in close con¬ 
nection with the spirit of early Christianity, strong ascetic 
(in the sense of renunciation of the world and its sin) and 
eschatological tendencies naturally follow. These again 
give rise to a certain secularization, a dualism with Chris¬ 
tian social life, a mere renunciation “ of the world.” 

Since the problem of the “ nation ” is part of the general 
problem of the “ world ” (history, culture, social life), we 
can here trace similar tendencies. As will be shown later 
on, it certainly does not follow that the Orthodox Church 
has taken a purely negative attitude toward this problem 


Church and Community 


132 

of the nation. In the Byzantine-medieval period, the de¬ 
velopment proceeded in such a way that the existing na¬ 
tional tendencies of the Orthodox peoples (which then 
bore a more political character) were left to be fashioned 
principally by the states. After the invasion of the Mo¬ 
hammedan Turks (and also the Tartars) a new situation 
emerged: the church and the (Christian) nation drew 
closer to one another, and to some extent even became 
fused with one another, for mutual protection against 
Islam. This situation was inevitable because these nations 
were now under the political control of Islam which every¬ 
where threatened both Christianity (church) and the 
(Christian) nation, and actually issued in the extermina¬ 
tion of a great part of Orthodox Christianity and of great 
numbers of the Orthodox peoples of Africa and Asia 
Minor, as well as in eastern Europe. 

This close and vital connection between the church and 
the Christian nations led not only to the deliverance of 
Christian peoples of eastern Europe in a national-political 
sense, but also to the cultivation of national cultures and 
the awakening and application of the principle of fellow¬ 
ship ( sobornost ) inside the church itself. This was not, 
however, the same Christian-ecclesiastical nationalism that 
we see today, which appeared only in the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury in connection with the development in the West. The 
connection was basically twofold. First, liberation from 
Islamic-Turkish subjection and the resultant national 
unity and independence permanently strengthened na¬ 
tional consciousness amongst the Orthodox peoples of 
southeastern Europe. Leading ecclesiastics and clergy 
shared in furthering this process. Second, and more im¬ 
portant, in the twentieth century the modern, secular na¬ 
tionalism of the West, with all its positive and negative ele¬ 
ments, penetrated into the life of the liberated Orthodox 


Stefan Zankov 


133 

Christian nations. Then for the first time the Orthodox 
Church saw the problem of the nation in its real depth, 
breadth, and significance; it saw the division between 
church and nation (national state) which here and there 
revealed itself; it realized the necessity of seeking a true 
Christian solution of the problem of the relations between 
church and nation. 

However, this awareness can hardly be said to be uni¬ 
versal. It must be admitted that for very many today in 
the Orthodox East our problem, as a church problem, 
either simply does not exist or is regarded as already solved. 

The few theologians and clergy in the Orthodox East 
who are occupied with the problem of the church and the 
nation endeavor to give some sort of answer to the ques¬ 
tion. Their answers represent only personal views. Un¬ 
fortunately, and frequently without substantiation, such 
views are stated as the “ official ” views of the Orthodox 
Church. This causes still more confusion among Ortho¬ 
dox Christians, in addition to the lack of clarity and the 
difficulty in understanding this question which in any case 
already exists. 

Thus, in dealing with this problem for the purpose of 
this discussion, we must turn to the history of the Ortho¬ 
dox East, to the Holy Scriptures, and to many of our East¬ 
ern traditions. 


2 . HISTORICAL SURVEY 

Although it is almost generally agreed that from ancient 
times up to the present day the national idea hardly ex¬ 
isted, and that such a conscious, intensive nationalism as 
that of today was unknown, nonetheless a national feeling 
was alive then among the peoples, at least in the love of 
home (land and people). This expressed itself externally 
in diverse ways. The Romans, for instance, preserved the 


Church and Community 


134 

national customs of other peoples incorporated in the em¬ 
pire. The works of many poets, though the Romans felt 
themselves lords of the Roman Empire, attest the fact that 
they loved their own narrower home. 

The Jews offer another case in point. Although for the 
Jews the religious and the national fused completely, their 
peculiar customs manifested themselves so strongly that 
they constituted a danger to the expansion, unity, and 
catholicity of early Christianity. The keeping of the law 
as national custom, the rise of Judaizing sects, the Jewish 
attitude which regarded the apostle Paul as a traitor, kept 
many Jews from Christianity. 

In ancient times, as in our own day, cultural type pro¬ 
vided the chief marks of national difference. In the his¬ 
toric development, adaptation and unfolding of Christian¬ 
ity we are able to trace down to the present time the 
continuous interactions of these differences. Three are 
paramount. 

The Greeks (or the Hellenists), through their language 
and especially through their rational, speculative, theo¬ 
retical, philosophic, and artistic endowment, through 
stern, logical schooling, and through their conceptions and 
forms of expression, shaped the Christian verities, those 
trinitarian, christological, soteriological, and mariological 
dogmas which pressed to the fore. They also formulated 
and insured the missionary task of the church. This East¬ 
ern Church system prevailed throughout the Roman Em¬ 
pire down to the fifth century, allowing the Greek language 
and Hellenistic (or Eurasian) culture to enter with their 
richness into the service of the church. 

The Syrian-Arabic culture with its artistic values and 
especially its passion-mysticism also attached itself to the 
church. This culture influenced not only Byzantine but 
also Christian peoples as far west as Germany and the 
Netherlands. 


Stefan Zankov 


135 

The Roman-Latin spirit came to the fore in the judicial 
and practical formation of ecclesiastical life. This spirit 
excelled in building up the law of the common life and the 
art of administration. It had a sense for external author¬ 
ity and subordination, along with a realistic and practical 
instinct in handling life which provided a basis for moral 
discipline and the shepherding of souls. The names of 
Tertullian, Cyprian, Fortunatus, Felixissimus, Novatian, 
come to mind in connection with the early beginnings in 
north Africa of this external ordering and unity, organiza¬ 
tion and discipline of the church. 

In the adaptation and the growth of Christianity in the 
first centuries these types of culture, each with distinctive 
features not yet overcome by Christianity, represented the 
beginnings of certain influences on the form of the church 
which foreshadowed the disharmony between the Chris¬ 
tian East and West. Among the Greeks (and the Eura¬ 
sians) such influences led to the exaggerated speculation 
which renounced the world in asceticism and contempla¬ 
tion, and prevented the comprehension of the meaning 
and significance of the papal idea and of the claim to an 
external monarchical authority in the church vested in 
the person of the pope. Among the Latins they made it 
difficult to appreciate the depth of dogmatic problems, and 
especially the sophistic, juridical formulation of the ques¬ 
tions of faith. It meant the incursion of a formal mechani¬ 
cal legalism, and the Roman autocratic spirit into eccle¬ 
siastical organization, and also the tendency to conformity 
to worldly authority. It meant also the survival (in the 
Roman-Byzantine conception) of the pontifex maximus 
idea in the emperor. 

Moreover, at that time, misunderstandings and confu¬ 
sion arose between outstanding Greek and Latin theo¬ 
logians. On the Greek side, Gregory the Theologian and 
Athanasius the Great are to be specially mentioned. These 


Church and Community 


136 

differences went so deep that in the Pelagian conflicts Au¬ 
gustine exclaimed: " Quid ergo faciemus, cum illi Graeci 
sint, nos veri Latini? ” (“ What shall we do then when 
they are Greek and we are Latins? ”) The conflicts be¬ 
came more serious when questions arose concerning the 
affairs of administration and the autocratic claims of the 
popes. 

But we also observe within Eastern Christianity itself the 
same effects of national differences working against right 
belief and unity in the church. This was true especially in 
the rise and development of Nestorianism and Eutychian- 
ism. Here the misunderstandings and national-political 
differences among the Byzantine, Syrian, Armenian, and 
Coptic peoples played a part. National peculiarities are 
reflected still more strongly in Syrian, Egyptian, Greek- 
Byzantine, and Armenian forms of liturgical usages and 
prayers. We may mention for example the liturgies of 
James, of Mark, and of Chrysostom; the use of the different 
Oriental languages in worship and preaching; the transla¬ 
tion of Holy Scripture and many other Christian docu¬ 
ments into these languages; the cult usages, festivals, and 
fasts; even the emergence of schools of different spiritual 
orientation — in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. A simi¬ 
lar development occurred in the West: diversity of lit¬ 
urgy persisted down to the time when the Roman papal 
liturgy triumphed through the sacramentary introduced 
by Charles the Great, but later, however, many liturgical 
diversities remained in the West, especially in the Frank- 
Gallic regions. 

For the purpose of this study certain points in the his¬ 
torical development of Christianity merit special consid¬ 
eration. 

In the East we must note the rise and self-assertion of the 
so-called national churches. Here, of course, closely bound 


Stefan Zankov 


137 

with the national element, the political element also played 
a part. Among these churches were the following: 

The Georgian (Russian) Church, which existed as a 
national-orthodox unity as early as the seventh century, 
and as an autocephalous body as early as the eleventh 
century. 

The Bulgarian Church, already existent in the ninth 
century, and autocephalous by the tenth century. 

The Russian Church similarly, especially after the 
Florentine union and after the fall of Constantinople. In 
this connection we note the ascent of Moscow as the third 
Rome, and its relation to national-orthodox messianic 
ideas. 

The Serbian Church, existent in the thirteenth century 
and autocephalous in the fourteenth century. 

The Rumanian Church, existent as an autonomous, 
national-ecclesiastical unity by the thirteenth century. 

The national Orthodox churches in the Ukraine, in 
Poland, in Finland, in Esthonia, in Latvia, in Lithuania, 
and in Albania, all of which have arisen since the World 
War. 

Along with the churches we note also three patriarchates. 

The Patriarchate of Antioch, which arose as a national- 
Arabic Orthodox Church in the second half of the nine¬ 
teenth century, finally winning the struggle with the eccle¬ 
siastical Greek minority, dominant until then. 

The Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which, from the middle 
of the nineteenth century, witnessed a struggle between the 
Arabian Orthodox majority and the small and dwindling 
Greek section which held the church power in their hands. 

The Patriarchate of Alexandria in which the Arabian 
Orthodox minority had a similar experience. 

Further, since the World War the leadership of the Or¬ 
thodox churches in Rumania, Greece, and Jugoslavia has 


Church and Community 


138 

been so strongly influenced not only by national but also 
by nationalistic trains of thought that the vital national- 
Orthodox minorities in these churches (chiefly Orthodox 
Bulgarians, Russians, Ukranians, and Albanians) have lost 
their national-ecclesiastical rights — the cultus, language, 
and national ministry — either completely or to a very 
large extent. 

In the West we must note a parallel development. It is 
surprising to observe that while nearly all Latin nations 
are Roman Catholics, nearly all Anglo-Saxon nations are 
Protestant, just as nearly all Greco-Slavs are Orthodox. It 
is often affirmed by historians that the conversion of Anglo- 
Saxon England to Christianity and the formation of a 
Christian community in England has helped the creation 
of a national unity. Even today the Anglican Church (not 
only in England) is a national church, just as the Presby¬ 
terian Church in Scotland may also be regarded as a na¬ 
tional church. 

In western and northern Europe the Reformation led 
not only to new political formations, but also to special 
national churches. 

The Unitarian and Hussite churches became national 
churches in Czechoslovakia. 

Lutheranism in the Scandinavian countries, in no way 
influenced by its national origin, took on a different char¬ 
acter from that in Germany. j 

In Germany itself, the national peculiarity continues to 
be in evidence, not only in the movement of the so-called 
German Christians. 

What does this review of history down to our own times 1 
say to us? In the first place, everywhere in the Orthodox 
East, nationality (Volks turn ), or the element of “ the na- 

1 A fuller account can be found in the present author’s Nation, Stoat, 
Welt und Kirche im Orthodoxen Osten (Sofia, 1937). 


Stefan Zankov 


139 

tional,” was always present, and played a definite and, 
indeed, a very important role in the history of Christianity 
and the church. 

Second, two fundamental facts appear: on the one hand 
the element of the national gave an impetus, a diversity, 
and an enrichment to the adaptation and development of 
Christianity. It proved itself often to be a gift which was 
also a problem which, when faced, produced great posi¬ 
tive achievements for Christianity and the church. On the 
other hand, however, the national element impeded the 
pure, unifying development, and indeed the greater ex¬ 
tension of Christianity and of the church. This connec¬ 
tion of the national element with Christianity related itself 
to the external organization as well as to the spiritual orien¬ 
tation of Christians. 

When this is the case, Christians and the church have 
before them a historical phenomenon of the greatest sig¬ 
nificance. This they cannot face passively simply because 
the nation itself is never passive, but rather a very active 
element in Christianity and in the church. In the present 
period this has become increasingly obvious. The nation 
now appears among almost all peoples in the powerful 
form of a conscious, supreme, aggressive nationalism, 
which threatens Christianity and all Christian peoples 
from many sides. 

Since the national element, the nation as a sociological 
and spiritual reality, appears as an active principle in the 
whole of history, like the institutions of the family and 
the state, it constitutes an important area of life. To it the 
church must take up an attitude, and in it the church 
must fulfill its task. The church cannot and may not be 
content to say that the nation (the people, the national 
element) is something foreign, outside the sphere of its 
activity. Neither may it say that the “ world ” (history, 


Church and Community 


140 

culture, the family, the state, community life) stands out¬ 
side its interest and the circle of its tasks. 

All this is especially true for the various branches of the 
church of the Orthodox East inasmuch as for them the 
nation has always played a greater and more important 
role than it has anywhere else. For them, also, in their 
spiritual and constructive tasks, the national problem in 
modern times has shown itself to be one of the most im¬ 
portant, full of possibilities, but not less full of dangers, 
for their work. 

It was indicated at the outset of this study that in the 
Orthodox Church no generally acknowledged (ecumeni¬ 
cally instituted), definite teaching exists to define the rela¬ 
tion between the church and the nation. On the other 
hand, we must point out that in recent literature it is af¬ 
firmed by many that such a teaching is given in the deci¬ 
sion of the Patriarchate of Constantinople at the Church 
Council of 1872 — the decision given against so-called 
phyletism. This affirmation is either plainly false or is 
based on a misunderstanding. 2 In the substantiation of 
this decision the following points are generally affirmed: 

The Christian church as a spiritual fellowship is com¬ 
posed of all peoples in brotherly unity in Christ. It is some¬ 
thing unknown in the Christian church that in one and the 
same place different ecclesiastical jurisdictions separated 
according to nationalities should exist. All local churches 
of a town and an area include all believers without differ¬ 
ence of nationality. That was the case at the beginning 
in Jerusalem, in spite of the conflicts which arose there 

2 This opens up a discussion of the Greco-Bulgarian national-ecclesiasti¬ 
cal conflict. The point at issue is the circumstances under which the vari¬ 
ous members participated in this council and its decisions. Further details 
can be found in my book mentioned above, and especially in an earlier 
work: Die Verfassung der bulgarischen orthodoxen Kirche (Zurich, 1918, 
Verl. Gebr. Leeman). 


Stefan Zankov 


141 

between Jewish and Greek Christians. Therefore, all 
churches have geographical and not national frontiers, 
even the churches of Tirnovo and of Ochrida, etc. 

This is also the sense of the canons of the Orthodox 
Church. The opposite position would overturn ecclesi¬ 
astical organization and the moral and judicial unity of 
the church. For this reason all canons are against it. With 
national divisions and divided jurisdiction of the church 
that condition of affairs would come into being which St. 
Paul condemned (1 Cor. 1:12) as a condition of confusion 
and chaos. Then, too, national egotism would be fur¬ 
thered in a so-called national church and gain such ascend¬ 
ancy over religious feelings that it would be very difficult 
to work for the fulfilment of Christian duty across national 
lines, and it would also most likely lead to national self- 
seeking. In the hearts of Christian people, national feel¬ 
ings and worldly advantages would have the greater influ¬ 
ence, a condition which would hinder religious fellowship 
with Christians of other nations in the mystical participa¬ 
tion in everything sacred. It would be improbable that 
the national churches would have religious fellowship in 
the spirit of mutual love and integrity, that their pastors 
would meet in local and ecumenical synods to work for the 
general spiritual good of Christians and people in general 
and for the good ordering of the whole church. It would 
be unlikely that the pastors would concern themselves for 
the general well-being and strive for the honor of God, of 
the Orthodox faith, and of the Catholic Orthodox Church 
of God. In all these instances things holy and divine would 
be changed into things human, and worldly advantage 
would be placed above spiritual and religious concerns. 

Granting the national principle, it was assumed that 
each national church would seek its own advantage. Un¬ 
der these conditions the dogmatic affirmation, which stands 


142 


Church and Community 


in its radiant greatness in the confession of faith, the af¬ 
firmation of “ the one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic 
Church,” would be overthrown. Thus, to the council, 
phyletism appeared as a struggle against Christian teach¬ 
ing itself and against the Spirit of the Holy Gospel. For 
this reason the Christian church would never set up and 
place in power such an anti-canonical concept as phyletism. 

With these affirmations the council passed judgment 
upon phyletism in general as well as on the Bulgarians in 
particular. In addition, in the instruments of the council 
and still more concretely in the different writings of the 
patriarchs, specific antiphyletistic pronouncements are 
made, implying that the Bulgarians had demanded a (na¬ 
tional) church without boundaries; that is, that the juris¬ 
diction of their national church should be extended every¬ 
where that believers of a definite (their) nation lived. 
This demand attributed to the Bulgarians of the Bulgarian 
Church is a pure fabrication, for the authorized leaders of 
the church and the overwhelming majority of the Ortho¬ 
dox Bulgarians have always and everywhere sought and 
demanded only a church with definite territorial bound¬ 
aries. The royal firman (decree) about the founding of 
the Bulgarian Exarchate (Art. X), as well as the statutes 
of the Bulgarian Exarchate formed in 1871, speak only of 
a Bulgarian Church with definite, strictly delineated dio¬ 
ceses. Alongside this judgment of the situation according 
to principle, the council issued the following decision: 

1. We judge, condemn and declare phyletism, that is, divi¬ 
sion according to racial origin (tas phyletikas diakroseis ), bias 
against a people (tas ethnikas ereis ), emulation arising from 
incongruity (zalous ), and conflicts (dichostasias) in the 
church of Christ as something which contradicts the evangeli¬ 
cal teaching and the canons of the holy fathers. 

2. Those who accept national differences of this nature and 
on them try to establish new phyletistic efforts, we declare, ac- 


Stefan Zankov 


143 

cording to the canons, to be excluded from the one, holy, catho¬ 
lic and apostolic church: that is, recreant (schismatic). In 
consequence, we declare as recreant those who have separated 
themselves from the Orthodox Church, and have, set up special 
altars, and have undertaken phyletistic efforts, and those who 
were consecrated by them as bishops, priests, and deacons, and 
all who have cooperated with them and are of like feeling, 
their co-workers and those who have accepted their holy (cult) 
institutions and their blessing as true and right — both clerics 
and laity. 

If we analyze the implications of this decision, we come 
to the following conclusions: 

In the first place, the decision, and the conception con¬ 
tained within it, is a local, ecclesiastical (consequently not 
ecumenical-orthodox) decision and conception, since the 
council which issued it was a local council of the Patri¬ 
archate of Constantinople. 

Second, judged on its own merits, this decision gives 
no comprehensive answer to our basic question concerning 
the relation between the nation and the church. That 
which the decision does express is at most a warning against 
the dangers inherent in an exaggerated nationalism in the 
church (national strife in the church). The decision does 
not tell us anything positive about the framing of the rela¬ 
tion of the church to the nation, an important area of the 
church’s task and influence. Consequently it helps us very 
little, if at all, in the solution of the problem of nation and 
church. 

Third, the decision also contains pronouncements which 
must at least be regarded as questionable, because they are 
unsubstantiated. One such is the assertion which, with re¬ 
gard to the church, rejects national distinction as irrelevant 
to the adaptation and external development of Chris¬ 
tianity. 

Fourth, because of this rejection the decision is unable 


144 


Church and Community 


to provide determinative direction for the subsequent de¬ 
velopment of the problem of nation and church in the Or¬ 
thodox East. 

When we see how important a part the nation has played 
in Christian history, and since the problem of nation and 
church has itself become one of the most burning problems 
of the church at the present time, one of the most important 
tasks of theology and the church must be to throw light on 
the question as to what actually the nation is, and what 
should be the relation between the nation and the church. 
With regard to the national differences in the church, 
Irenaeus said that if only doctrines were uniform and love 
were in control, differences were irrelevant or must be 
endured. 

In this situation, can the right balance be achieved? 
What directing principles may we deduce here on the 
ground of Holy Scripture? What can we learn from the 
best traditions of the church and from the long experience 
of the church in the centuries of its history? 

3. FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES 

What is to be understood by the word “ nation ”? In 
spite of the earnest efforts of the best informed, the con¬ 
cepts of people (Volk ), nation, nationality, have not been 
unequivocally explained. It has become somewhat clearer 
how, since the end of the eighth century, nationality — na¬ 
tion in its most recent form — has arisen out of emotional 
love for home, land, and people, and out of its more 
political-cultural basis in the past. By such nationality we 
mean conscious cultivation of the national language, the 
creation of a national army, the democratic principles of 
the French Revolution: government by the people, the 
declaration of the right of self-determination, the enhanc¬ 
ing of the social element of the community life, romanti- 


Stefan Zankov 


145 

cism, the national-political movements for freedom. Nev¬ 
ertheless all that cannot exhaustively explain how what we 
now know as a nation arises or has arisen nor indeed what 
the nation actually is. When by nation we mean not merely 
the population of a land or the members of a state, but that 
spiritual collective body which in the past, present, and 
future feels itself to be a unity, is conscious of itself and 
emerges as a whole — in other words, that which the Ger¬ 
mans today understand as Volkstum — then it is not only 
difficult but almost impossible to apply an objective cri¬ 
terion to the concept “ nation,” or to try to find a criterion 
through some fixed combination of several of its inherent 
elements. 

The physiological or biological, the race or blood rela¬ 
tionship in a nation is an element that either does not exist 
in real completeness (unity of origin of the human race) 
or it is something hypothetical and, in any case, secondary. 
Today it is established that “ pure ” nations in this sense 
nowhere obtain, and the higher a nation is spiritually, the 
more completely is it mixed. The blood relationship in a 
nation is rather to be understood as an expansion of the 
family or the kin, but even in this sense it is something very 
hypothetical. 

The natural combination of territory and climate is also 
a very indefinite factor in a nation. On the same territory, 
or in a like climate, many nations often live. On the other 
hand the different parts of a single nation may live in differ¬ 
ent circumstances in regard to territory and climate. The 
streams divide, but they also unite. Present-day means of 
communication have further diminished the significance of 
this factor for the development of a nation. 

These two, physiology and geography, are physical ele¬ 
ments of the entity nation. All remaining ones are of a 
spiritual character. 


Church and Community 


146 

First of these is language. This we regard as a basic fac¬ 
tor, as the sharpest expression of nationality in primitive 
as well as in highly developed nations. It appears as the 
artist of the people, as the mediator of their exchanges, and 
as the highest bond of national fellowship, as well as the 
most sacred value of each nation. Nevertheless, language 
is neither the sole nor the decisive mark of nationality. For 
example, there are several nations which speak the same 
language, such as the English and the English-speaking 
North Americans, the Spaniards and the Spanish-speaking 
South Americans, the Portuguese and the Brazilians. 
There are also those who regard themselves as a political 
and even a national unity but have within themselves 
groups of people speaking different languages: for example, 
the Basques in Spain, the Bretons in France, the Welsh in 
Great Britain. Further, inside a nation having one written 
language, we also find many dialects which are different 
to the point of being unintelligible to one another, as, for 
example, many of the German and Russian dialects. There 
are, in addition, other nations such as the Jews who have 
lost their own tongue, but who nevertheless remain through 
the millenniums decidedly a nation. In any case a lan¬ 
guage, inasmuch as it appears as an essential element of 
nationality, is an expression of the soul and is thus a spir¬ 
itual element, especially in connection with the literature 
of a nation. 

In the second place, many regard religion (or the con¬ 
fession) as a sign of nationality, a sign which would be true 
in part of antiquity. After Jesus Christ, this was radically 
altered and now one can scarcely speak of a national re¬ 
ligion in the fundamental sense of this word. Many dif¬ 
ferent nations belong to the same religion or confession, 
and individual nations belong to different religions or con¬ 
fessions. On the other hand, we may observe that the na- 


Stefan Zankov 


147 

tional character has always somehow imparted its peculiar 
characteristics to the adaptation or the development of the 
church as the outward form of the Christian religion. 3 

Further, we must mention here usages, customs, tradi¬ 
tion, the so-called national culture (art, education, local 
customs), and in particular common experiences and 
memories, common destiny (suffering, honor, history, so¬ 
cial solidarity, common strivings or common will) —all 
being in the nature of a common consciousness, a self- 
determination, a self-affirmation, a self-recollection. There 
is also the knowledge of interpretation of a common special 
task, faith in a common aim and a common mission in his¬ 
tory, both essential and significant for the nation as such. 
But all this is precisely a complex of great spiritual entities 
or values of the national unity from the past, in the present, 
and for the future. Here real and irrational elements meet 
and intertwine inextricably in the forming of a nation and 
its character. 

Finally, many count the political-state unity the essen¬ 
tial characteristic of a nation: the state for protection, dis¬ 
cipline, culture; the nation as a growing organism, with 
the state as the framework, the organization of a nation. 
However, the state is hardly a necessary element of a nation, 
since not all nations are united as states, and several nations 
or parts of nations can live in one state. 

In this survey of various approaches to the concept “ na¬ 
tion,” we wish to make clear why it is not possible exhaus¬ 
tively to explain the nation by analysis or logic, either 
through the different elements which are attributed to it 
or through any combination of those elements. There 
always remains something in it which cannot be under¬ 
stood on rational grounds, and which must be designated 
by such words as metaphysical, irrational, and transcendent. 

3 Compare on this point the facts in the historical survey given above. 


Church and Community 


148 

That does not mean something wholly “ unconscious ” or 
“ instinctive ”; still less does it mean any abstract synthesis 
of empirical facts, as do the phenomenological, nominal¬ 
istic or positivistic or, further, the liberalistic or socialistic 
explanations of the nation with which we are now familiar. 
The nation is above all a great spiritual entity. It is the 
spirit of a nation which makes the nation, a spirit which 
stretches indeed beyond the empirical and stands in essen¬ 
tial connection with the irrational and transcendent. It is 
something both mystical and real. It arises from intuitive 
events, out of mystical experiences in a higher world (the 
transcendental). Therefore, the nation is, beneath all its 
manifestations, in its deepest being, always a definite and 
great reality, perceptible in the world and in life. For this 
reason, organically, it has of necessity grown up with a 
moral ordering, with an ideal of a higher nature, with faith 
in a historical task and with religion. In a certain sense the 
nation is an idea of God; a call of God which then becomes 
a vocation; a gift of God which then becomes the task of a 
people as well. 

This suggests the second fundamental principle to be 
derived from a survey of the history of peoples: namely, 
the faith of a nation in a vocation and in a mission, in a 
task to be fulfilled in history, is neither fabricated nor 
fortuitous. By whom is a nation called? By whom sent? 
Whose missionary is it to be? By whom is the task set? 
These questions are always questions of faith, questions 
which have meaning and power only when they are dis¬ 
cerned as something from on high, from God himself, from 
God, the Lord of History, who calls the nations, places 
tasks upon them, endows them with special gifts for these 
tasks, and sends them out to the fulfilment of the tasks. If 
this is so, a responsibility is laid upon all nations to see 
whether and how the call is accepted, how gifts for the spe- 


Stefan Zankov 


149 

cific tasks are employed, how the mission is being fulfilled 
— a responsibility which is also connected with the judg¬ 
ment and punishment of God upon all nations. 

We have characterized the nation as an entity which is 
both mystical and real, one, therefore, which is twosided 
and with a twofold meaning. As a creaturely reality it is 
something conditioned and transitory, liable to sin and 
subject to corruption — a fact which will be dealt with 
later. On the other hand, through its mystical or trans¬ 
cendental element, through the entry of the spirit of God 
into its life, through the harmonious connection of the 
divine-human in its nature, the nation acquires its actual 
meaning and value, its consecration, its inspiration and 
dynamic. 

In this connection we observe in the history of nations 
the positive contributions of peoples, just as earlier we 
traced the part played by the Greeks in the history of Chris¬ 
tianity. In more recent times among Orthodox peoples, 
the Russians in particular have been under the influence 
of the messianic idea. Indeed, Russian messianism is a 
religious-Christian messianism. Men such as Dostoievski, 
V. Soloviev, Chomiakov, have shared and preached this 
faith in the universal Christian mission of the Russian 
people, but it actually goes back to the Middle Ages, that is, 
to the idea of Moscow as the third Rome. In the course of 
the centuries the message has changed its content consider¬ 
ably. On the one hand it has been conditioned by Old 
Testament tendencies; for example, from the Josephites, 
on through Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great down to 
the present-day Russian communists. On the other hand, 
it has been guided by a genuine New Testament spirit: im¬ 
pulses to freedom, love, and sacrifice. This appeared first 
in the spiritual outlook of Nil Sorski and continued on 
through many groups of sectaries down to the most recent 


Church and Community 


150 

days of the Russian Starzen — the famous monistic fathers 
of the present-day confessor-martyrs. Of course, much is 
contained in these movements which is false and unhealthy, 
but there is also great strength: passionate devotion to 
Christ, together with outstanding instances of courage of 
conviction and martyrdom. 

Over against the juridical-temporal and absolutistic, as 
well as the rationalistic-individualistic currents in Christi¬ 
anity, we find this faith in the Christian sobornost, that is, 
faith in the mystical fellowship of the church as an ecumeni¬ 
cal power in the world. This issues in a universal feeling 
of solidarity, a readiness to serve all and to display the ut¬ 
most sacrifice in full surrender for the realization of the 
universal idea of freedom and righteousness. In this 
sobornost we find also a deep warm piety, the redemptive 
power of all voluntary suffering, the inward impulse to an 
integral and ideal transformation of life. In this connec¬ 
tion we must draw attention to the fact that the Russian 
people, apart from the worldly motives of political leaders, 
have put enthusiastic devotion and great sacrifices into the 
cause of the liberation of the peoples of southern and east¬ 
ern Europe. The Orthodox Russians have accomplished 
much for the extension of the Christian faith among the 
Asiatic people. Actually, the Russian Church alone among 
the branches of the Orthodox Church has conducted an ex¬ 
ternal mission up to the present day. Today, the Russian 
people as well as the Russian state is in this sense no longer 
a part of Europe, but is Eurasian, which means that for this 
people above all the way lies open to take ideal Christianity 
to the great communities of Asia: they are called and com¬ 
missioned of God. 

Returning to the element of creaturely reality, we recall 
that the nation, as well as the separate individual, is subject 
to the dangers of alienation and even of falling away from 


Stefan Zankov 


151 

the transcendental and from God; the nation may lapse 
into sin and diabolical behavior. Self-seeking and self-love, 
pride, envy, hate and robbery of other nations, are, as his¬ 
tory shows us, all too apparent manifestations of the life 
of nations. Besides, and more important, national self- 
love exaggerates the value of a people from a conditioned 
and transitory reality into one unconditioned and eternal: 
an absolute. As we note here and there today, this fre¬ 
quently means deification of the nation, “ national idola¬ 
try,” self-satisfaction and self-worship. Dechristianized and 
anti-Christian nationalism lapses then, inevitably, not only 
into a pagan polytheism but also into a zoological natural¬ 
ism (blood mysticism). Thus faith in a national mission 
becomes transformed into a great delusion and into brutal 
imperialism — a severe spiritual, ethical, and religious dis¬ 
ease which often leads to death, to the judgment and pun¬ 
ishment of God. 

Two chief results of a nation’s falling into this error of 
false nationalism can be observed. Since such nationalism 
sets up the nation as the highest good it denies the actual, 
the eternal, the divine value of the individual person and 
utterly suppresses his freedom. Of course this sin, like 
every other, fails in the end; no truly free nation can exist 
without the freedom of the individual persons of whom it 
is composed. The mother (the nation) cannot live by 
robbing her children (the individual persons) of their 
highest good, that is, of their freedom. The individual in 
human life is an original creation of God, is made in the 
image of God, and has within him the breath of God. Be¬ 
cause of the eternal value of the individual and of his free¬ 
dom the two greatest tragedies in the world have run 
their course — the tragedy of Paradise and the tragedy of 
Golgotha. 

Looking further we observe a second major consequence 


Church and Community 


J 52 

of false nationalism. The fundamental principle of human 
fellowship moves in two directions: we see it developing as 
diversity in unity or as unity in diversity. In the first, 
reason and meaning is given to the peculiar nature and the 
unique value of the life of individual personalities and of 
nations. In the second, the harmonious united life of all 
individuals and nations attains reason and meaning. False 
nationalism undervalues other nations, sets up its own na¬ 
tion as the one chosen of God above all others. It claims 
the call of God to a specific mission only for itself; it sets 
itself not only above other nations, but also above (or 
against) the Lord of History and of the world, and through 
its nationalistic state absolutism ends in that warlike, god¬ 
less imperialism of international robbery and brutality 
which finally collapses — under the judgment and the pun¬ 
ishment of God. 

It is possible to recognize in history two further basic 
principles of community life: first, the trend of the sepa¬ 
rate peoples toward unity within the manifoldness of na¬ 
tions, the movement toward the ecumenical, the universal; 
and second, the inherent divisive tendencies of exclusive 
nationalism. Exclusive nationalism leads not to unity, but 
to justifiable conflict for the individuality of peoples threat¬ 
ened and violated by one nation; that is, it leads to division 
of the nations. Thus, empirically, the evangelical truth of 
Christ finds confirmation, the truth that individual persons 
and peoples can only be united harmoniously and perma¬ 
nently through the divine way of love and service. We find 
confirmed also the truth that only along this evangelical 
way can the high value and the individuality of persons as 
well as of peoples be preserved, protected, and cultivated. 
Christ himself was crucified in the name of just such a false 
nationalism. 

In this light we may rightly judge the significance of 


Stefan Zankov 


*53 

leaders or prophets in the life of nations. In line with the 
twosidedness of the national life noted above there are two 
categories of leaders and prophets: false (those serving the 
evil in the nation) and true (those favored or sent by God). 
The false prophets preach national egoism, national self- 
satisfaction, national arrogance, and superiority over all 
other nations; they go to the extent of exalting their own 
nation to the position of the highest, final, and absolute 
good in the world; in actual fact they lead their peoples to 
self-deification and draw them on to inward and outward 
collapse. The true leaders and prophets of a people, how¬ 
ever, do not remain content with things as they are; they 
give themselves neither to overestimation of the self and 
self-exaltation, nor to self-pride, nor to self-worship; above 
all, they hold to the true command of God and remember 
the true divine-human mission of their people. With a 
feeling of the highest responsibility toward this voice and 
mission they drive themselves and urge their nation with 
passionate love and hope to strive unremittingly for the 
higher, and always to have a consciousness that they are un¬ 
worthy for their mission, that they are no more than 
humble servants of God and of mankind in all nations. 
From the Christian standpoint these leaders draw their na¬ 
tions, and all nations, through the way of love and service 
to all, to the highest achievements in human history, to the 
greatest expression of both manifoldness in unity and unity 
in diversity. 

We come now to the deduction of a third fundamental 
principle, namely, the relation of Christianity itself to the 
nation. How does Christianity, and above all the Holy 
Scripture, relate itself to the facts which we have hitherto 
ascertained? In the nature of the case Holy Scripture can¬ 
not be silent, giving us no directing principles for a judg¬ 
ment on the problem of the nation — a problem, as we have 


Church and Community 


154 

seen, of the highest significance and consequence in the 
life of mankind. 

In the Old Testament we find set out in the list of 
peoples in Genesis 10 the historical distribution of the sons 
of Noah into separate tribes and nations. Is this distribu¬ 
tion a direct or pure creation of God, “ an order of grace,” 
or is it “ an order of history,” a historical process permitted 
by God, which is maintained for a specific period and 
whose continuance in any period depends upon God’s will? 

The whole context of the biblical narrative and of many 
other elements of biblical history supports the latter point 
of view. The words of Genesis 12:3 and the messianic des¬ 
tiny of the people of Israel show that in the Bible other na¬ 
tions can be regarded as cursed nations, spurned so far as 
they give themselves over to idolatry as enemies of God. 

The story of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11) illuminates 
our problem precisely from these two points of view. The 
incident of the confusion of tongues and the scattering of 
mankind into peoples divided according to language is 
indeed, on the one hand, a consequence of opposition to 
God, but also at the same time a favor of God in order to 
preserve mankind from presumptuous human striving. In 
this divine judgment, too, we see the saving purposes of 
God. Further, we have seen that the foundation of the 
nations, or of national states, does not consist only in lan¬ 
guage, since men can speak the same language but, if love 
is lacking (which understands all things), they do not un¬ 
derstand one another. When we connect the tower of 
Babel narrative with the speaking in tongues under the in¬ 
fluence of the Holy Ghost (Acts 2:7 ff.), the actual sense 
of the Babylonian confusion of tongues becomes clearer: it 
is a parable of the fact that mankind cannot make progress 
by opposition to God, through its own powers, and still less 


Stefan Zankov 


155 

can man take heaven by force. The same narrative shows 
us that since the fall nations, as well as individual men, 
stand under sin and therefore in need of salvation, and that 
the certainty of salvation is found among them from the 
days of their origin (Gen. 12:13). We learn of this prom¬ 
ise again and again from biblical history (Ps. 62:10; 22:28; 
Isa. 52:5 ff.; Amos 2:1 ff.; 9:7). 

The history of the chosen people of Israel also affirms this 
fundamental truth of the Bible. God appears in a special 
relationship with this people. This people is chosen, not 
because it is in itself a specially noble people, but on ac¬ 
count of the humble believing Abraham who, in the midst 
of a medley of gods, stood firm in relation to the one true 
God. Here we have a people and a universal religious mis¬ 
sion closely connected. The prophets have, of course, pas¬ 
sionate love for their people, but preach at the same time 
the threat of severe judgment on account of their separa¬ 
tion from God. This chosen people is then shattered on 
the living God, and as it becomes opposed to God, lapses 
into false national-political tendencies and experiences 
tribulation on the cross of salvation. Therefore the judg¬ 
ment is appropriate that the people of Israel are rejected 
since it is no more a “ people of God ” but wishes to be a 
“ god-people.” 

That in the New Testament people and peoples are not 
rejected without some reason, we discern from the fact that 
Christ speaks the language of his people, loves his people, 
suffers on account of their sin, and laments their hardness 
of heart (Luke 19:41). Christ says that he has been sent 
first to the lost sheep of Israel (compare also Matt. 10:5), 
and he lives under the traditional forms of their religion. 

Or take the apostle Paul: he loves his nation so much 
that he would be accursed of Christ if thereby Israel might 


Church and Community 


156 

become blessed (Rom. 9 ff.); and he preaches the gospel 
first to the Jews (Rom. 1:16; 12:10). He acknowledges, 
however, the nature of other peoples: in Athens he does 
not start from the Old Testament, but from the national- 
religious usages of the Athenians. 

In the New Testament, a people and peoples are spoken 
of as something given, which may not be denied or brought 
to nought in this world, but are to be encompassed and 
transformed by the gospel. The gospel directs itself to na¬ 
tions, but first of all to men, to men in their attachment to 
a people (Matt. 28:19; compare also Rev. 2 and 7). When 
it is said in Galatians 3:28, “ There can be neither Jew nor 
Greek,” the principle is naturally affirmed (as Paul also 
says in Rom. 10:12; cf. John 17:21) that in Jesus Christ all 
are one. But in the Orthodox East, with all its national 
conflicts — not to mention its church conflicts — we under¬ 
stand this sentence also in the sense that in Jesus Christ 
all, nations included, are equal. Manifestly the apostle 
Paul, in this passage, does not deny the differences between 
Jews and Greeks in this world, just as he does not remove 
the differences between man and woman when he says in 
that passage that “ there can be neither male nor female.” 
The unity of faith in Christ does not erase these differ¬ 
ences, but places male and female, Greek and Jew, in 
Christ and in his church, in life in general, on an equality. 
This sentence carries an unusually important significance 
for the attitude of the church to the nation. Without 
denying the right of existence to any nation the church 
sets them on an equality and has to deal with them all in 
like manner. For that reason Christ sends his apostles to 
all nations alike, to preach his gospel (Matt. 28:29). For 
this reason Gentiles need not become Jews in order to 
believe in Christ. All people are of like worth and of 
equal status (the apostolic council). And the apostle 


Stefan Zankov 


*57 

Paul, the Jew, therefore preaches Christ as Saviour of all 
peoples, as Saviour of the whole world. 

The basis of this equality is given by the apostle Paul in 
the following words: “ And he made of one blood all 
nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth ” 
(Acts 17:26; compare also Gen. 2:7 ff.). And not only 
has he made all one, but all according to his image also 
(Gen. 5:1). Therefore the same promise and the same 
gospel apply to all in like manner. When we glance at the 
national languages in the New Testament we find con¬ 
firmed again the acknowledgment of the peoples upon the 
surface of the earth and their fundamental equality (Acts 
2:3 ff.; 1 Cor. 14:6-9). 

In the New Testament we find also another very im¬ 
portant passage concerning our problem, namely, that for 
the peoples God “ determined their appointed seasons and 
the bounds of their habitation,” in order that “ they 
should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him 
and find him . . . for in him we live, and move, and have 
our being ” (Acts 17:26 ff.). God, therefore, determines 
for the peoples time (rise, growth, disappearance), place 
(extension and form), and destiny (general and particu¬ 
lar) . Thus God acts as Lord of History and of the world. 
That God chooses the separate peoples as performers of 
his will, calls them to special tasks and endows them with 
special gifts for the fulfilment of their tasks, we see in the 
history of the people of Israel (e.g., Isa. 41). There are 
also many indications of this same activity of God’s in the 
New Testament (e.g.. Rev. 2 and 3). When nations do 
not perceive and observe this, then God sends prophets to 
them. When still they continue deaf and blind “ and will 
not walk in his ways ” and “ will not listen to his law,” 
then there pours out over them “ the fury of his anger . . . 
and it hath set him on fire.” (Isa. 42:24-25). In calling 


Church and Community 


158 

to tasks, as well as in passing judgment, God regards 
neither countenance nor origin, but only the appointed 
task and the accomplished act (Acts 10:34 ff.; Rom. 2:11). 
No preference is shown for any people. Not difference of 
nationality but difference of deeds is the decisive thing 
(Chrysostom on Rom. 2:11). 

These fundamental principles of the New Testament 
relative to the question of the nation, even if very impor¬ 
tant are only of a general character. They simply attest 
the fact that the New Testament does not leave the nation 
out of consideration: that all nations are to be assessed 
equally and that all are in like manner called of God. The 
New Testament, however, says still more to us about the 
purpose of God, about the life of the nation and of the na¬ 
tions, especially about the highest, final purpose of their 
existence. In the first place that passage is to be noted 
which says that the Kingdom of Christ, of God, is not of 
this world. Then for us all, whether individual men or 
members of a nation, our home is not on earth but in 
heaven: “ our citizenship is in heaven ” (Phil. 3:20; com¬ 
pare Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1; Heb. 12:22). Further, we know 
that all in all belongs to us: “ Other foundations can no 
man lay than that which is laid which is Jesus Christ ” 
(1 Cor. 3:11). He leads us to the Kingdom of God in 
heaven. Ultimately the “ end ” comes upon earth when 
“ he (Christ) shall have delivered up the Kingdom to 
God, even the Father, when he shall have abolished all 
rule and all authority and power ” (1 Cor. 15:24). Even 
heaven and earth pass away, and we shall see a new heaven 
and a new earth (Rev. 21:1). This new world or heavenly 
home before which the whole temporal world or home 
passes away, only the “ worthy ” will attain (Luke 20:35). 
These “ worthy ones ” out of this earthly home are set over 
against the “ carnally minded ” whose “ God is their belly 


Stefan Zankov 


159 

and whose glory is in their shame.” Out of these promi¬ 
nent New Testament passages we see what is the actual end 
of the nations and of their members upon earth, and what 
is their final destiny. 

What then, briefly, are the fundamental truths implied 
in these passages? We may put them in this way: The 
highest end of the nation upon earth is to seek God, to 
know and to find the one who is God of love, in Him — in 
love — to live, to move, and have its being. The mission 
of each people consists in realizing the service of love to 
all, both to individual men and to peoples, along the way 
of the cross and of self-sacrifice. The determinative prin¬ 
ciple, in a word, is to acknowledge and exercise love to 
one’s neighbor in the name of God the Father. 

Finally, two further directing principles must be made 
plain. First of all the fulfilment of this supreme task 
among mankind rests upon the incarnation of Christ, an 
incarnation at the same time prolonged within the nations 
themselves. Further, this fulfilment stands in close or¬ 
ganic connection with the existence, the task and the 
work of the church in the world of nations. Through the 
grace and love of God the Father, through the leadership 
of its Head, Jesus Christ, and the sanctification of the Holy 
Spirit, the church penetrates and gradually transforms the 
world of nations, she encompasses and unites it in one 
catholic whole and leads it to the Kingdom of God. This 
whole task is a work of inner transformation, a leading of 
the nations over from the kingdom of the natural and 
historical into the kingdom of the supernatural — the 
grace of unity. The apostle Paul (Col. 3:11; Gal. 3:28; 
1 Cor. 10:32; etc.), as well as the early Christians, 4 speaks 
indeed of “ Jews, Greeks, barbarians, Scythians,” but also 

4 Cf. A. Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, second 
edition, II, 211 ff. 


160 Church and Community 

at the same time of Christians as a “ new people,” of a new 
grade of the human race, of a Christian “ body politic.” 
This new, chosen race of saintly people of God is also, ac¬ 
cording to the apostle Peter (i Peter 2:9), a “ royal priest¬ 
hood,” a people for God’s own possession. 

A fourth source of light upon our problem is found in 
the century-long tradition of the Orthodox churches which 
bears witness to a close relationship between the nation, 
or national state, and the church. An account of this 
tradition proves that the Orthodox church fully acknowl¬ 
edges the national spirit — the nations; to a certain extent 
she has nurtured and has entered into a positive connec¬ 
tion with them. If it is anywhere possible to speak of a 
service of the church — not of a relation of servility toward 
the nations but in the sense of a historic calling (mission) 
of the church toward the nation — one may look above all 
to the Orthodox East. 

This relationship becomes more clear if we consider 
certain facts. The Orthodox Church has nearly every¬ 
where found the peoples (with the exception of the 
Greeks) whom it has converted to be barbarians rather 
than socially advanced people. She preached the gospel 
to them, but at the same time provided them with the 
foundations of a higher spiritual (“ cultural ”) life as a 
necessary medium for the right adaptation and develop¬ 
ment of the gospel, starting always from where they were. 
Almost everywhere the Orthodox Church created writing 
and literature, deepening and ennobling language and art. 
She used these cultural instruments at first for the work 
of her own higher, evangelical task, but this service became 
also the basis of the national culture of the peoples. Lan¬ 
guage in particular effected unity. The word “ people ” 
in Church Slavonic is “ tongue ” (language). Further, 
the clergy were the creators of the language and the pro- 


Stefan Zankov 


161 

ducers of the literature — teachers of the people in the 
double sense of the word: religious and national teachers. 
Out of this connection the national priesthood arose, the 
actual bridge builders between the church and the nation. 

Another element of this connection between the church 
and the nation in the Orthodox East is the greater simi¬ 
larity between the social-human side of the church, in 
terms of organization and educational form, and the peo¬ 
ple as a whole. The communal form of the church, es¬ 
pecially through the Orthodox Slavonic principle of sobor- 
nost, was analogous to the community sense and commu¬ 
nity practice of the people. Consequently we can observe 
here also a certain connection between church and people, 
a characteristic popular coloring of the external form of 
the church, in order that the church may be better and 
more easily understood by the people. However, this does 
not denote a mixing of the concepts of people and church. 
The church preserves its transcendence, its special nature 
and authority, and if it is occasionally oppressed and mis¬ 
used the initiative comes from the side of the state. 

In the Orthodox East still another element played an 
important role in the binding together of church and peo¬ 
ple. Both people and church in the past, especially since 
the invasion of the Turks and Tartars, underwent the 
same difficult experience. In those long and difficult times 
it was the church alone which supplied the people with 
spiritual support, comfort, awakening and renewal. 

Because she shared this common experience the Ortho¬ 
dox Church had an unusual opportunity to be the spiritual 
mother and leader of her people — to lead her people to 
God as the Lord of their history, to interpret to them its 
meaning and task for them as a people, to give them the 
law of God as the foundation of their historical life, and, 
not least, to preserve them from sin and to be their guard- 


162 


Church and Community 


ian. This leadership and unitive endeavor of the Ortho¬ 
dox Church did not take on the form of a worldly external 
overlordship over people or state. It was a living leader¬ 
ship, inasmuch as it was always actuated from above (tran¬ 
scendental) and from within outwards. Therefore, in the 
Orthodox East, it is generally admitted that the Orthodox 
Church has been the soul and conscience of its peoples. 
Most present-day Orthodox theologians avail themselves 
of the metaphor “ body and soul ” in order to give expres¬ 
sion to the relation between nation and church. 

In this sense we can speak of national churches in the 
Orthodox East. We can say that the Orthodox churches 
(at least in principle and for the long centuries of the past 
down to modem times) were national in that the church 
mingled with the people without losing its identity, just 
as Christ, the Head of the church, out of love and in order 
to be a bringer of salvation, took upon himself the form 
of a servant but did not lose his identity. Not in vain 
did the Orthodox churches wage battle earnestly against 
Arianism. The Orthodox Church acknowledged the pe¬ 
culiar nature of its people and was concerned — at the 
same time as it ministered to its own need — to bring 
other peoples to God, to lead them to Christ. 5 

The nineteenth century brought an essentially different 
situation. Since the rise of nationalism and of national 
conflicts among the Orthodox peoples in the East, the 
Orthodox Church finds itself in new circumstances. It 
faces the national problem in its modern sense, with all 
its complexity and all its dangers to which we have already 
called attention and about which something more shall 
be said. 


5 It must be understood that these final statements signify only the 
ideal and point out the general lines or basic direction without discussing 
either the apparent difficulties or the accompanying human inadequacies. 


Stefan Zankov 


163 

We come now to an examination of Orthodox theology 
as it bears on our problem. Orthodox theology has not yet 
dealt with the problem of the Volksnomos 6 but it has for 
a long time faced the problem in actual reality, in hard 
facts. This has been true at least since the middle of the 
nineteenth century, and especially in the modern period, 
the so-called secularistic intellectualism, as well as nation¬ 
alistic ecclesiastical trends, being in the forefront of dis¬ 
cussion among all intellectual and political leaders. The 
western European fashion of disrespect toward religion and 
the church has appeared as an infection of considerable 
power. As long as the Orthodox peoples of southeastern 
Europe had not attained their political liberty and unity, 
their temporal leaders esteemed the church as a national 
institution, through which national political freedom and 
unity might be attained. But even in that earlier period 
they either would not allow the church to assume the 
actual spiritual leadership of the nation or made it very 
difficult. This inevitably led to a division in principle 
between the “ nation ” and the nationalistic state, that is, 
between the temporal leaders of the nation and the na¬ 
tional state. 

We do not yet see the final result, but the whole develop¬ 
ment proceeds in the direction of division. This process 
is made more difficult today because a great part of the 
priesthood itself has a strong nationalistic orientation, and 
each of the new Balkan states (Rumania, Greece, and 
Jugoslavia) contains considerable Orthodox minorities 
which, according to the prevailing view, are to be absorbed 
into their national state homes so that with the church 
assisting they shall be denationalized. This mixing up 
of the church with the nationalistic politics of the state 

e By this term is meant “ people’s culture, soul, consciousness,” and the 

like. 


Church and Community 


164 

obscures the real crisis in which the relations between 
church, nation, and state find themselves today. It is also 
not often clear to many clergy and theologians exactly 
what this conclusion means in particular instances and to 
what it may finally lead. 

The secularly oriented intellectual and political leaders 
have little knowledge either of Christianity or of the Or¬ 
thodox Church, and still less of what Volksnomos should 
mean. But what they express in worldly language and 
what they demand from or do with the church testifies 
to the fact that they are inspired by the idea of a Volksno¬ 
mos which is autonomous, claiming independence of reli¬ 
gion and the church. They seldom interest themselves in 
the question whether this “ people’s soul ” harmonizes 
with the “ law of God.” In the Orthodox East we find the 
affirmation openly made that it is the business of the 
church to serve the people and to support the national 
state. The church has no right to speak a word of its own 
in political-social affairs. She cannot place people or state 
under a “ spiritual censorship,” still less can she enter into 
opposition to the state on principle. If she did so she 
would be a national church no more. The national 
church owes obedience to the people and faithfulness to 
the state (the state authorities). This often leads to the 
Church’s being misused through the clergy as a tool of 
politics. This danger will probably continue for a short 
time, inasmuch as a nationalistic attitude toward minori¬ 
ties is in question. 

In all matters of the spiritual leadership of the people, 
we observe how the division between the church and the 
nation or national state comes to a decisive head in the 
field of principles. For the Orthodox churches the foun¬ 
dation of this division is given in the tradition of the 
Orthodox Church which has been sketched above. Many 


Stefan Zankov 


165 

ecclesiastics and theologians of the present day already 
follow this line of thought in the question of the spiritual 
leadership of the people. In the face of extreme national¬ 
ism, moderate Orthodox opinion is gaining strength in 
eastern Europe. As representative of this opinion we may 
note, for instance, among the Russians, religious thinkers, 
notably N. Berdyaev, 7 V. Zenkovsky, 8 S. Franck, 9 B. Vys- 
cheslavzeff, 10 and theologians like S. Bulgakov, 11 A. Kartas- 
chov, 12 V. A. Beliaev, 13 M. Zyzykin. 14 We find other mod¬ 
erate voices among the hierarchy. Metropolitan Anthony 
(Chrapovitzki) says concerning our problem: 

Patriotism which is cut off from the Christian faith and the 
church is robbed of all logical meaning. It is no more than an 
expanded egoism, a raw national egoism, lust after fame and 
self-interest. Such a patriotism acknowledges moral criteria 
only for the citizens of its state. Such a patriotism is an idol, a 
self-deification. 15 

7 See his article, “ Polytheism and Nationalism,” in the (Russian) pe¬ 
riodical The Way, Paris, 1934, No. 43, where he shows that modern nation¬ 
alism implies a dechristianization of the community, a paganizing of it, a 
reversion to heathen idolatry. 

8 Cf. his contribution in the collective work Orthodoxy and Culture, 
(Russian) Berlin, “ The Idea of the Orthodox Culture,” pp. 25 ff., also 
p. 227; also his article, “ The National Question in the Light of Christian¬ 
ity,” in the Russian periodical The Messenger, Paris, 1934, No. 4, pp. 7 ff. 

» Cf. his book The Spiritual Basis of Society (Russian), Paris, 1930. 

10 Cf. his contribution, “ The Religious Meaning of Power,” in the col¬ 
lective work The Church and the State Problem in the Present, Geneva, 
1935, pp. 183 ff. 

11 Cf. his “ Observations upon Nationality ” (Russian) in the periodical 
Questions of Philosophy and Psychology, Moscow, 1910, No. 3, pp. 385 ff. 

12 Cf. his article “ Church and Nationality ” (Russian) in the periodi¬ 
cal The Way, Paris, 1934, No. 44, pp. 4 ff. 

13 Cf. his contribution “ Nationalism, War, and Christianity ” in the 
Russian periodical Christian Selections, Petrograd, 1915, July-Sept. 

14 Cf. his article “ L’figlise orthodoxe et la nation ” in the periodical 
Irenikon, 1936, Prieure d’Amay-sur-Meuse, Belgique, May-June, pp. 266, 
277. 

1 5 Cf. Vol. IX in the Bulgarian periodical The Orthodox Missionary, 
1932 . 


166 


Church and Community 


We find similar ideas expressed in recent times among the 
Greeks, especially by P. Bratsiotis and H. Alivisatos, 
among the Rumanians by Scherban Jenescu, and among 
the Serbs. Bishop Nikolai Velemirewitsch, of this latter 
group, wrote recently: 16 

A good patriot is he who before all is a good man; but in the 
whole world there has been no power, and will be no power, 
which can make mankind good except the power of the Chris¬ 
tian faith. All qualities of the good Serb, all the best charac¬ 
teristics of the Serbian people — that is, honesty, brotherly 
love, tenderness, humility, compassion, love of peace, right¬ 
eousness, goodness, courage, wisdom, moral sensitiveness — are 
derived from the faith. When thou hast none of these quali¬ 
ties of thy celebrated ancestors, and nevertheless namest thy¬ 
self a good Serbian, thou art as a sign of a famous firm over an 
empty business. 

And in his writing “ Concerning the Nationalism of St. 
Sava ” he says that the true, Christian-Orthodox national¬ 
ism is not a narrow and exclusive nationalism, is never 
chauvinistic, but honors and loves all peoples. 

To sum up regarding the problem of nation and church 
in the Orthodox East: we can give unqualified support to 
the following assertion. Parallel with the worldly currents 
of an extreme nationalism, a nationalism which, in recent 
times, has come to regard the nation and the national state 
as the highest good of human existence, and to look upon 
the national church as an attribute of the nation, the Or¬ 
thodox churches, through their ecclesiastics and theologi¬ 
ans, defend the principle that the church, although it 
acknowledges and cultivates the nation, is in itself non¬ 
national, transcendent, of divine origin, a divine-human 
being. 

For centuries, in consequence of difficult historical cir¬ 
cumstances, the idea of the catholicity of the church has 

is In his periodical Missionary, No. 1, V. 


Stefan Zankov 


167 

been weakened and darkened in the consciousness of the 
Christian society of the East. Now, however, this idea be¬ 
comes stronger from day to day and catholicity is ever more 
emphasized through the current strivings for a real unity 
among individual Orthodox churches and through their 
participation in ecumenical movements. 

In the Christian society of the Orthodox East, one speaks 
and writes often of a Christian nationalism and patriot¬ 
ism, with emphasis on the word “ Christian.” Every pa¬ 
gan, godless (a-religious) nationalism and patriotism is 
decisively rejected because the eternal forms of Christian¬ 
ity are presupposed and expressly emphasized as the abso¬ 
lute foundation for all human and community life. The 
service of the church is to be a spiritual mother and leader 
of the nation, to lead the people to God, and to make all 
peoples sons of God. 

With reference to the ecumenical side of our problem 
we can say, on the basis of our discussion, that from the 
standpoint of the Orthodox Church the Christian church 
in origin, being, and aim is fundamentally a universal 
community. The church is a universal community for the 
reason that it is a holy, catholic, and apostolic church, unit¬ 
ing all those whom it encompasses through one faith as a 
catholic unity. All its members are one and have solidar¬ 
ity in creation (one God the Creator, one blood, one image 
of God), solidarity in sin, in redemption, and in salvation. 
Therefore the church is not a mere organization or a hu¬ 
manly united society, but the mystical body of Jesus Christ. 
The “ natural ” here becomes a new creation. In the 
church the natural is not denied, but the supernatural is 
set above the natural. Toward the nations a transforma¬ 
tion of the essence of Christianity according to their spe¬ 
cial characteristics is neither attempted nor realized, but 
to them is made an adaptation and appropriation of Chris- 


i68 


Church and Community 


tianity. In principle, no antinomy lies in this demarca¬ 
tion; it is the basis for a manifoldness in unity and for the 
possibility of the cooperation of the peoples, the possibility 
of a vocation in the sense of the service of love toward one 
another (i Cor. 12:12 ff.) till they all become one people 
of God, children of God, all one in God the Father. 

Catholicity, as universality, is ideal in character. It is 
realized in history when the nations, on this Christian 
basis, give expression to the ideal, when they give evidence 
of the universality of Christianity in their actual achieve¬ 
ments, and help it to victory. In the fulfilment of that 
purpose Dostoievski saw the high destiny of the Orthodox 
Russian people. This present-day faith of the Orthodox 
Church is not a rosy optimism arising because it under¬ 
estimates the nature and the effect of evil and sin in this 
world. On the other hand, it is no pessimism. The Or¬ 
thodox Church simply believes that for the renewal and 
final salvation of men, of nations and of mankind, a radical 
renewal, a “ catastrophic salvation,” is necessary. There¬ 
fore, as opposed to the irrationality of sin, including the 
sin and demonism of the nations, the Orthodox Church 
emphasizes the eschatology of salvation. The ecumenicity 
of the Orthodox Church is a prophetic-eschatological ecu¬ 
menicity. 


CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 

by 

Edwin Ewart Aubrey 








CHURCH AND COMMUNITY 


Anyone who has watched the struggle between Church 
and State in Germany or Russia is vividly reminded that 
the spirit of a people (Volk) may be brought into opposi¬ 
tion to Christian ethics and to Christian institutions. In 
both these countries, however, it is very difficult to say how 
far the real public mind is opposed to Christianity. When 
the national community (Volk) is set in antithesis to the 
Christian constituency, the opposition may easily be an 
artificial one, for they are inevitably “ members one of 
another,” since the members of the churches in a given 
country cannot abstract themselves from the social life 
of the nation in which they live. Furthermore, these two 
countries present the spectacle of a once powerful estab¬ 
lished church now throttled by the government; whereas, 
in the United States, there never has been an established 
church. 

It is perhaps valuable, therefore, to offer in this essay an 
interpretation of the basis of American thinking on this 
problem. We can then examine the more general prob¬ 
lem of the Christian constituency in relation to the na¬ 
tional life, and try to show what is the function of the 
churches in the life of a people. 

1. THE AMERICAN SETTING OF THE PROBLEM 

The problem of church and community assumes a quite 
different form in the United States from that which char¬ 
acterizes most of the European countries. There are a 
number of reasons for this difference. 


Church and Community 


172 

In the first place, we have in the United States no Volk 
in the German sense of this word. The idea of a national 
community based on a homogeneous racial grouping and 
defined by a common attachment to a soil which has for 
so many centuries given life to the German people, and 
the notion that in the process of human history this Ger¬ 
man people pursues its own unique destiny for which its 
peculiar standpoint and its racial tradition prepare it — 
these conceptions are foreign to American thought and 
experience. We are a country of heterogeneous cultural 
background. Our streams of immigration displaced the 
native Indians who belonged to the land, and this conquest 
was completed only within the last fifty years; so that the 
culturally dominant group is not that which “ belongs ” 
to the land. Even the immigrant groups have fluctuated 
in their numerical proportions. During our colonial pe¬ 
riod, prior to 1790, the British immigrant group consti¬ 
tuted more than three-fifths of the total population, and 
this proportion remained the same till about 1850, when 
the German and Scandinavian groups began to increase. 
The stream of south European immigration set in in the 
nineties, introducing still another religious and cultural 
current into the American scene. 

Here we are, then, with the complex variety of cultural 
traditions; and any student of American political life en¬ 
counters these crosscurrents in public opinion. All Eu¬ 
ropean political or cultural conflicts are re-enacted on 
American soil. There is no uniform body of public senti¬ 
ment or of cultural presuppositions to which appeal can 
be made. This condition has two results in American life. 
In the first place, movements have arisen which seek to im¬ 
pose one cultural tradition upon all groups in the nation: 
the Daughters of the American Revolution have sought to 
stamp the Anglo-Saxon impress upon all newcomers in 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 


173 

their program of “ Americanization/* An important eco¬ 
nomic factor enters here: the fact that some cultural back¬ 
grounds (notably the African, the Italian, the Mexican, 
and the Slavic) have been represented principally by un¬ 
skilled laborers. Thus their submerged economic position 
has tended toward their cultural subordination. Violent 
attempts at such cultural subordination explain such phe¬ 
nomena as the Ku Klux Klan in recent decades. The other 
result of this cultural complexity is that, precluding as it 
does any common assumptions which we can take for 
granted, it forces Americans into a greater exercise of ex¬ 
ternal organization than would otherwise be necessary. 
This explains the characteristic often noted by European 
observers that we want to organize everything; for external 
organization tends to appear where common presupposi¬ 
tions are lacking. At the same time, we are forced to live 
together, and certain external uniformities tend to drive 
us into common action without common assumptions. 
This in turn gives rise to the general American approach 
to problems of ecumenical cooperation: that common ac¬ 
tion can be engaged in without waiting for the clarifica¬ 
tion of basic assumptions. We have had to do that in our 
national life in order to cope with problems of a rapidly 
moving society. 

In so far as a common national mind appears it expresses 
itself largely in the negative form that European differ¬ 
ences— which create our major obstacle to the develop¬ 
ment of an American cultural unity — shall not be allowed 
to disrupt our own nation. This helps to explain the 
popular insistence on neutrality in this country. We seem 
to have coalesced into four or five regional forms of “ com¬ 
munity ” in the United States at present, but not into any 
real national “ community ” of feelings and assumptions. 
There do seem to be fairly clear-cut differentiations into 


Church and Community 


174 

the east, the south, the middle west, the western plains, and 
the Pacific coast — differentiations which mark off bound¬ 
aries of economic and political outlook, of general moral 
attitudes (mores), of self-conscious regional solidarity, and 
of general Lebensanschauung. One has only to mention 
to Americans the cities of Boston, Richmond, Chicago, 
Omaha, and San Francisco to suggest at once these cul¬ 
tural differences. How soon these regional mentalities are 
likely to merge in a national community of thought and 
feeling is a matter of speculation. It is really only since 
the decline of immigration in the last two decades and the 
stabilizing of the birth rate that a sense of national stabil¬ 
ity is emerging. We have nothing in this country clearly 
corresponding to the feeling of continuity in national his¬ 
tory that attaches to the term Volk . Few Americans would 
incline to think of their nation as a Schopfungsordnung — 
a God-established national destiny whereby world history 
could be brought to its fulfilment. While there is occa¬ 
sional talk of “ God’s country ” this is without theological 
significance, and is merely a superlative way of referring 
to material blessings. It is true, however, that a measure 
of community corresponding to the German Volk appears 
in what is often called the “ American dream.” This is the 
hope of developing a nation grounded in equal opportu¬ 
nity and democratic freedom, with vigorous and aggressive 
improvement of the conditions of human life, free from 
artificiality and subterfuge, and with mutual enrichment 
by our many peoples. Yet only recently have the Ameri¬ 
can intelligentsia been moving on from imitation of Euro¬ 
pean cultural patterns to the creation of an indigenous 
culture. 

For over a century and a half we have had a disestab¬ 
lishment of the churches from state support. Except for 
exemption from taxes, religious institutions receive no 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 


*75 

emoluments from the government. At the same time, the 
United States has been a real pioneer in religious liberty, 
and care has always been taken to respect the religious 
scruples of our many sects. There are religious ceremonies 
in our national life: the President at his inauguration 
kisses the Bible, sessions of the Congress are opened with 
prayer, and in the autumn the President issues a Thanks¬ 
giving Proclamation couched in religious terms and read 
in churches and synagogues alike. But these religious acts 
do not identify the nation with any particular religious 
group. They seek rather to rise above particular theolo¬ 
gies in a common recognition of one God. The Congress, 
as the political expression of the national unity-in-diversity, 
never passes upon religious questions as such; and no such 
controversy as the recent Prayer Book revision controversy 
in England is conceivable in the United States. 

It is becoming clear that the issue in this country will 
doubtless be faced in the area of public education. So long 
as the church held a virtual monopoly of education for 
character, dealing with fundamental moral values while 
the school dealt exclusively with secular information, there 
was no meeting ground for a conflict. But more recent 
educational theory has led public educators to assume 
responsibility for character training. Education is viewed 
as practice in the arts of cooperative living, and conse¬ 
quently moral implications are present throughout. Fur¬ 
thermore, such working out of social relationships in the 
classroom and on the playground inculcates definite stand¬ 
ards and objects of loyalty. At this point the contact, and 
potential conflict, with religious ideals becomes obvious. 
The case of a group known as Jehovah’s Witnesses, who 
incurred governmental coercion for their refusal to partici¬ 
pate in a classroom ritual of saluting the national flag, is 
only an extreme instance of a more general problem. But 


Church and Community 


176 

where such conflict emerges it does not indicate that the 
state is affiliated with any special theological interpretation 
of the religious bases of morality. The official policy is to 
disclaim concern for special theological tenets. The 
church and the state are not bound together by any com¬ 
munity of popular sentiment such as makes an Anglican 
church the official center of communal religious values in 
the English town or village. 

At the same time, we have developed in the United 
States an unusual ease and rapidity of communication 
among our people as a result of widespread motor travel 
and the popular press. This leads to that flexibility of 
thought which so often puzzles European observers. We 
are accustomed to encounter these differences of cultural 
outlook and have learned good-naturedly to take them for 
granted as part of our public life. This can be seen in any 
municipal election in an American metropolis, where an 
astute politician can trade upon the special cultural preju¬ 
dices of Italian and German immigrant stocks or of those 
of Irish, Swedish, or Negro background. While this may 
be our avenue to that community which may some day 
come to characterize us as a Volk, it is at present a basis for 
a tolerance of criticism and an elasticity of thought which 
often borders on skepticism. But, at any rate, it relaxes 
the rigidity which so often characterizes the “ national out¬ 
look ” of a more homogeneous country. 

It is an interesting fact that sociology has developed far 
more rapidly and extensively in the United States than 
anywhere else. Whatever may be the merits of this aca¬ 
demic discipline as a social science, and whatever may be 
the explanation of this precocious growth, it is clear that 
by means of it we have been led to examine the cultural 
processes from the empirical standpoint. It is a truism to 
say that consciousness is heightened by conflict; and it 
may well be that the conflict of cultures within our own 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 


177 

social life accounts for this preoccupation with the study 
of social process. In any case, cultural sociology has sub¬ 
jected the phenomena of culture to penetrating analysis 
under national conditions which have thrown cultural 
contrasts into bolder relief. It is so much easier to study 
objectively the cultural attitudes of a Polish, or Mexican, 
or Russian Jewish, or Scandinavian group in America, be¬ 
cause comparisons and contrasts can be so clearly drawn 
within our own country. This formal study is supple¬ 
mented by the informal observations made in schools in 
the state systems where children of these differing back¬ 
grounds are to be found sitting side by side. Under 
these conditions it is difficult for any group to assume 
its superiority and God-given mission as blandly as in a 
homogeneous community where no rivalry appears. Any 
culture is thus treated with deference but without slavish 
adulation, and the consequence is that the claims of com¬ 
munity (das Volk) are never accepted with the mystical 
fervor characteristic of the homogeneous nation. At the 
present stage, heterogeneity is too obvious to be theorized 
out of existence. 1 

2. THE NATURE OF COMMUNITY 

It may serve to clarify the term “ community ” or Volk 
if we examine the processes which give rise to that unity 
of social outlook and assumptions which characterizes a 
people. For this unity the phrase “ a culture ” is usually 
employed in American sociology; and it is from this so¬ 
ciological point of view that we propose to enter the pres¬ 
ent analysis. 

The term “ culture ” has two meanings in English. In 

1 The question may fairly be raised whether the actual heterogeneity 
in Germany (e.g., as between Prussians, Bavarians, and Thuringians) and 
in other European nations is not overlooked rather than dissolved in the 
term Volk. But such a critical discussion lies beyond the scope of this par¬ 
ticular essay. 


Church and Community 


178 

the first place it refers to the elaborate structure of social 
relations which make the life of a people, such as “ Indian 
culture.” In the second place it connotes a certain quality 
of life in an individual person — a man of culture, a cul¬ 
tured woman. To the second of these we shall return in 
section 4 of this essay. For our approach to the problem 
of Volk let us now examine culture as a complex system 
of social relations. 

When we observe the civilization of a very different 
people we are first impressed by the external differences: 
the form of dress, the style of architecture, the way of 
using tools, the forms of salutation, and so forth. A little 
closer inspection reveals the nature of their institutional 
practices: the organization of their governmental control, 
the form of priestly hierarchies, the relations of the family, 
the regulations governing property and contract, etc. But 
the foreigner who dwells among a strange people and 
seeks to understand them discovers after a while that there 
is something deeper and subtler than these folkways and 
institutions, something built into the very structure of 
thought and feeling, that underlies these external aspects 
of the culture. There are internal attitudes not easily 
grasped by external observation. We call them mores and 
public opinion; and every diplomat knows that an under¬ 
standing of any nation is impossible without sympathetic 
insight into these attitudes, this “ mentality ” of the people. 
Here lies the real “ community,” the secret of the Volk. 

The external aspects, the folkways and institutions, are 
the accepted ways of doing things. So habitual are they 
that they tend to become nonrational ways of behaving. 
They are activities which have “ ahvays been done this 
way,” and their persistence tends to raise them above 
rational consideration. Indeed, there is a sense of im¬ 
mediate connection between these ways of acting and their 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 


179 

technical excellence: customs of other peoples are “ queer,” 
“ curious,” and even “ inferior.” For these patterns of 
behavior are unconsciously imitated and become an un¬ 
conscious part of the activity of the members of the group. 
The individual who acts in these ways shows that he “ be¬ 
longs,” and he is approved. Thus are built up around 
them by association (or “ conditioning ” as the psycholo¬ 
gists now say) strong emotional attitudes which lend them 
an inner sanction or authority. This may be so profound 
that it is taken for an instinctive, biological necessity, and 
a theory of racial superiority is formulated to rationalize 
this deep-seated feeling. 

We see, then, how the external aspects of a culture (in¬ 
stitutions and folkways) are reinforced by internal aspects 
(mores and public opinion). Mores are folkways which 
are considered to be related to the welfare of the group. 
They are, therefore, distinct from certain folkways like 
the use of knife and fork, but are embodied in other folk¬ 
ways like modes of salutation between the sexes (e.g., note 
the Oriental objection to kissing on the mouth in public). 
The moral attitudes of a people are thus a composite of 
feelings towards certain folkways (feelings which have 
been ingrained by education in the traditional ways of 
behaving) and judgments relating these folkways to the 
welfare of the group. How rational these judgments are 
will depend on the degree of emancipation of the individ¬ 
ual from socially inherited attitudes. Such judgments, 
when shared by the populace, are spoken of as public 
opinion in the moral realm. Public opinion is a body of 
judgments of the group on matters significant for group 
life; and as this significance becomes more profound the 
public opinion takes on the character of mores. 

Since the mores involve judgments of values, they are 
related to more remote ends, to conceptions of ultimate 


i8o 


Church and Community 


human destiny (on which, in the last analysis, definitions 
of what makes for the “ welfare ” of the group must de¬ 
pend) . Such ultimate conceptions do not usually appear 
in the actual content of public opinion; but they are im¬ 
plicit. 8 Mores, then, are not so easily changed. Further¬ 
more, the ways of seeking an intellectual approach to the 
more remote ends of group life may vary. From this fact 
arise differences in “ racial mentalities.” Groups which 
are culturally unified tend to develop characteristic ap¬ 
proaches to problems, so that we think of the British tend¬ 
ency as being extrovert, while the Russian of the ancien 
regime was regarded as essentially introvert. Clearly such 
generalizations are precarious, but they do stand for felt 
differences in cultural outlook. From these cultural back¬ 
grounds the individual thus receives his “ mind-set,” his 
ways of looking at life ( Lebensanschauung ), including the 
unconscious criteria of value used in passing judgment 
on all sorts of questions of individual or social import. 
Consider the indifference of an East Indian to the haughty 
Anglo-Saxon rejection of some idea as “ impractical ”! 
(Where cultural unity is undeveloped, as in the United 
States, there is inevitable conflict of those mind-sets, result¬ 
ing in great instability of public opinion, and in a freer 
empirical attitude toward new problems and new phe¬ 
nomena. This may explain the vogue of the pragmatic, 
functional test in American thinking as well.) 3 

Now, between those external and internal aspects of cul- 

2 In the ancient Hebrew conception of the “ chosen people,” the pride 
in nation was definitely related to a conception of God’s purpose for the 
world, and took on a moral aspect. Similar ideas appear in modern 
thought in “ the white man’s burden ” and the Volk als Schopfungsord- 
nung. 

3 This is the basis for censorship and exclusion of alien influences as a 
means often employed to bolster up a threatened ideology. Its fallacy is, 
of course, that these measures are taken only when the influx of alien pat¬ 
terns has been recognized, and then it is too late. 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 181 

ture there is continual interaction. The institutions of 
a given society are organizations which embody basic con¬ 
cepts or purposes. In some institutions the purpose is 
clearly understood: e.g., military institutions exist to afford 
physical protection to a nation. In some institutions the 
purpose is in dispute: e.g., the traditional theory of mar¬ 
riage has held that it exists to procreate and rear children, 
whereas many modern theorists hold that children are not 
the central concern of marriage, which exists to afford mu¬ 
tual satisfaction and companionship for two members of 
opposite sexes. In still other institutions the purpose is 
not seriously considered, being often lost sight of in the 
activities it has engendered: this is largely true of our eco¬ 
nomic institutions despite the basic criticisms aroused by 
the depression through which we have been passing. Be¬ 
tween the conception of an institution’s purpose and the 
organization which embodies that purpose there is con¬ 
tinual interaction and tension, since social changes always 
require readjustment of the institutional structure to give 
new implementation to the purpose. Where isolation of a 
group allows an institution to be perpetuated in its struc¬ 
ture, the concept is thereby reinforced. What is always 
done tends to be regarded as “ sound.” Conversely, rein¬ 
forcement of a concept or purpose from other quarters 
tends to strengthen the structure of the institution: e.g., a 
philosophical defense of belief in God serves to give added 
strength to the church. 

On the other hand, contact with different organizational 
patterns tends to make people raise questions regarding 
the validity of the purpose of familiar institutions, as when 
democratic and fascist institutions are brought face to face. 
Criticism of institutions then ensues; and this is why our 
age of rapid and easy communication has aroused such a 
critical spirit with reference to hitherto “ respectable ” in- 


182 


Church and Community 


stitutions. The prophet is always an insider with outside 
experience, like Amos, the Judaic herdsman, selling his 
produce to Assyrian and Egyptian merchants and hearing 
the echoes of imperial thunderings. Such a prophet may 
criticize the structure of the institution, recommending 
more efficient organization to effect its purpose, and be¬ 
come an ecclesiastical reformer. Or he may criticize the 
formulated concept which lies at the center of the institu¬ 
tion, and call for theological restatement. Or again, he 
may question the basic significance of the purpose connoted 
by the formulated concept, and throw down his challenge 
to radical reorientation of the whole institution, as Jesus 
seems to have done with the Jewish law. This last and ex¬ 
treme type of prophecy amounts virtually to a new crea¬ 
tion in a culture; and it will therefore be looked upon as 
apostasy, as abandonment of the institution. Hence the 
death of Jesus, and hence the Gentile mission of Paul as its 
logical culmination. 

This is, then, the process of culture and cultural change 
in folkways, mores, and institutions. In this process the 
church, as a social institution, finds itself involved. All of 
the things that have been said here about institutions in 
general apply to the church in particular. In this sense, 
the church is to be understood as a part of culture. 

3. THE PECULIARITY OF THE CHURCH AS A 
SOCIAL INSTITUTION 

The question therefore immediately arises: By what 
right does the church assume authority to direct criticism 
at other institutions? Here is the question which laymen 
inevitably asked at the Oxford Conference. This is, in my 
judgment, the practical question which underlies the dis¬ 
cussion of secularism. If the church is regarded as on a 
par with other social institutions and subject to the same 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 


183 

laws of social development, and if its concept or basic pur¬ 
pose is statable with reference to social functions in the 
same way as for other institutions, then we have a situation 
in which the church is regarded as simply and solely a 
phase of culture. It then belongs to “ this age,” this 
seculum: it has been “ secularized.” At this point it is 
then fair to ask how the church can rise above other institu¬ 
tions so as to pass judgment upon them. 

Here we come to the heart of the problem of church and 
community. Here, in Emil Brunner’s terminology, the 
divine imperative and the social institutions are brought 
face to face. Admittedly, the churches that we know in 
local communities are a strange mixture of current social 
prejudices and of loyalty to something which lies beyond 
the most rational and the most worthy of our social 
opinions. Yet this combination of outreaching faith and 
stumbling formulation, of high ideals and mediocre 
achievement, of representative priestly functions, and all- 
too-human ecclesiastical pretensions, seems to be the only 
way of carrying on the religious function in the commu¬ 
nity. The difficulties are inherent in the social process of 
religious institutions. The Christian constituency is in 
the world. Can it help being of the world? How can it 
stand above the surrounding world as a lantern set upon a 
hill, even while it is a leaven in the lump of human 
society? 

A clue to the answer may be found by reminding our¬ 
selves that while the church, like other social institutions, 
embodies a purpose in an organization structure, it em¬ 
bodies a peculiar type of purpose which is the core of this 
particular institution. 

For we may look at this central differentiating character 
of the Church as peculiar by virtue of its origin, or we may 
regard it as peculiar in its function. That is to say, we may 


Church and Community 


184 

seek either for an abiding essence traceable to a super¬ 
natural revelation, or for a perpetual concern which is 
characteristic of its direction of change — a perennial con¬ 
cern with ultimate values. It is further possible to com¬ 
bine these two in a religious world view which thinks of 
the ultimate values as implicit in the origin. This last has 
been the characteristic Christian view. From this stand¬ 
point, then, the church is distinctive among social institu¬ 
tions because it alone, of all the institutions of society, is 
primarily concerned with man’s origin and destiny. Be¬ 
cause of this special concern, it bases its authority upon an 
objective truth which reaches out beyond the social milieu 
to the universe, and beyond the human adventure to the 
larger context from which man derives his meaning. Its 
task among the institutions of society is to cultivate in man 
the sense of a past and a future which reach out illimitably 
beyond the present, and to help him to see and to live out 
his meaning as a person on that cosmic stage . 4 

In this the church stands close to the concerns of philos¬ 
ophy and ethics. But philosophy, while it embodies specu¬ 
lation upon these ultimate matters, is never institution¬ 
alized, and thus appears as an abstract undertaking when 
compared with the fellowship of the really Christian 
church. It is true that philosophy becomes religious at 
the point where decision is made with one’s whole life at 
stake; but it is also true that the church is a body of those 
who make a commitment beyond the range of social cal¬ 
culation. Ethics as a discipline either remains in the spec¬ 
ulative area of philosophy, or becomes practically em¬ 
bodied in institutions like education. To this extent it is 
incorrect to base the peculiarity of the church as a social 

4 It must be regretfully admitted that the church as referred to in this 
and the succeeding paragraphs is the church at its best, not as we usually 
encounter it. We speak of the church in principle — but how often she is 
false to her principle! 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 185 

institution upon its ethical character. The important dis¬ 
tinction lies in the transition from an ethical to a religious 
perspective; that is, from concern with the adjustment of 
human relations for mutual benefit to concern with the ul¬ 
timate meaning of human life on which the determination 
of “ mutual benefit ” must rest. Just as religion transcends 
ethics by cultivating contact with eternity, so the church 
differs from educational agencies in any culture by its 
traffic with a larger world than our social environment. 

To cultivate this sense of eternity is the function of all 
such dialectical criticism as that of Karl Barth and his fore¬ 
runner, Kierkegaard. As in the antinomies of Kant, the 
experience of men is pushed back to its boundaries where 
solutions become contradictions, and we are challenged to 
reach out in faith where knowledge fails us. For faith is, 
in the words of John Macmurray, “ what you propose to do 
in the face of your ignorance.” It is the task of good 
preaching — as of other forms of religious education — to 
lure people beyond their accepted answers for life’s riddles 
to deeper questionings. To accomplish this, it is necessary 
both to break down facile self-confidence and to point a 
way. Mountain mists conceal the summits but someone 
shows the trail to the heights, and the wayfarer goes on 
beyond the foothills that had looked so high. This sense 
of eternity is also to be cultivated in worship and the mysti¬ 
cal experience, where the surrounding mystery of life holds 
us in its grip and transmutes our petty satisfactions into 
profounder longings, our pride into humility, our self- 
assurance into pious hope, and our fearful, wavering wills 
into calm and steady devotion. At this point, reflection 
and mystical absorption move over into decision where the 
wager must be made with all of life as the stakes. In such 
a moment of actual decision a man stands at the outpost of 
his accumulated experience, and on the threshold of an 


186 


Church and Community 


eternity which he cannot fathom but in relation to which 
he must now act. 

By all these paths, man is led to the perpetual tension 
between the present and the boundless context which we 
call eternity. In consequence, the church is always a con¬ 
scious fellowship of failure, a community of sinners. Here 
it stands in its peculiar place among the institutions of 
society. The awareness of tension between the temporal 
and the eternal fosters a discontent which makes the sinner 
repentant. It is this repentance which makes it impossible 
for the really Christian church to be censorious and phari- 
saical. If the church issues a call to society to repent, it 
must be a call to join the church in its own repentance. 
Here is the secret of the church as a leaven in society; it 
engenders the spirit of repentance whereby self-criticism 
appears among the adherents of other social institutions. 
It cannot loudly proclaim its right to criticize the social 
order, it can only set the example and foster the attitude of 
self-criticism. But its self-criticism is of a drastic sort, for 
it is born of comparison, not with the feasible, but with the 
highest conceivable. Yet, because the community is 
caught in its own established values, which are not merely 
intellectually accepted, but emotionally ingrained, the self- 
criticism of the community is well-nigh impossible at the 
religious level. Hence the church stands ever at the elbow 
of society as it seeks to justify itself and says, “ Not enough! 
Not enough! ” until its challenge sounds like the unrelent¬ 
ing voice of God. 

At the same time, the church is like other institutions 
a fellowship of faith, fostering confidence and hope. Un¬ 
like other institutions, however, it seeks an ultimate basis 
of confidence and hope. It cannot rest content with assur¬ 
ances of “ national security,” of “ economic stability,” of 
“ familial happiness,” but pushes on to deeper sources of 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 187 

stability and joy. Its philosophy of culture cannot stop 
short of a religious faith. It sees society and all its institu¬ 
tions standing at a point of decision on the brink of the 
unknown; and it cannot therefore find happiness in being 
conformed to this world. Thus it has ability to enter into 
cooperative relations with other institutions while, at the 
same time, refusing to accept their standards. It is, in this 
sense, “ in the world but not of the world.” This is, I be¬ 
lieve, what the exponents of Christianity as “ an interim 
ethic ” seek to express in their eschatology. From the 
church’s standpoint no social absolutes are acceptable, but 
must give way to the claims of another order. It remains 
skeptical of all of them, and expresses this skepticism by 
asserting that they are valid only for a restricted context of 
reality. Over against them the church will set a wider 
reality from the very scope of which is derived a greater 
truth. In one form, this wider context is the fellowship of 
Christian faith throughout the world, transcending par¬ 
ticular national or cultural absolutes in the spirit of ecu¬ 
menical Christianity. And this spirit is not merely that of 
a congeries of national churches, but the Una Sancta, the 
holy, universal commission and faith of those who follow 
Christ. But there is also another context of reality to 
which the Una Sancta points. It is the cosmos in which 
our little earth is set, the vastness of which defies the intel¬ 
lect. Not knowing, we reach out in hope. But hope is 
the fond mother of credulity; and when we become credu¬ 
lous, false knowledge has usurped the throne of faith. It 
is the acknowledgment of her ignorance which must save 
the church from pride, and from arrogating to herself 
powers of salvation which she knows she does not have. 
Thus humbled, she takes her place among the social insti¬ 
tutions with greater confidence, because she does not claim 
too much. Her very humility is the ground of her chal- 


i88 


Church and Community 


lenge to the unwarranted claims which the community 
makes upon her members in the name of narrower life. 

4. THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN IN THE COMMUNITY 

But we are in danger of dealing in abstractions unless 
we remember that institutions exist by virtue of the loyalty 
of their adherents. Yet these adherents are themselves 
members of several institutions at the same time, and these 
various institutions exist in them as attitudes of loyalty 
and devotion. Let us return to our second conception of 
culture: as a personal hierarchy of values in the “ cul¬ 
tured ” man. The common misconception of personal 
culture makes of the cultured individual a mere conform¬ 
ist to accepted practices. On the other hand, the cultured 
man sees the practices of his surrounding culture in per¬ 
spective — the long perspective of the ages of human his¬ 
tory, the broad perspective of the range of different cul¬ 
tures all around the world, the deep perspective of human 
nature and its needs, and the lofty perspective of great 
ideals. With such perspective, he cannot be a shallow con¬ 
formist, but must inevitably be a critical member of that 
community in which he has been reared. In him its ten¬ 
sions appear as psychological conflicts, just as surely as he 
embodies in his emotional attitudes its outlook on life. 
Here appear the conflicts between church and community 
in their acute form as personal spiritual crises. But here, 
too, is where decision takes place. That is why the layman 
is so important in the church: his life is bound up with the 
community to a greater degree than that of the profes¬ 
sional religious leader; and in him the ethical decisions 
reach their acutest form. What is the meaning of the 
church in relation to community for him? 

The conflict is in him a conflict of attitudes, a conflict 
between the judgments of value, the presuppositions, the 
unconscious assumptions prevailing in his community and 


Edwin Ewart Aubrey 189 

those which are built into his life as a church member. 
But the attitudes of his church membership have a refer¬ 
ence beyond the fellowship in the social group which con¬ 
stitutes the local ecclesiastical institution; they reach out 
to the eternal objects of religious faith — to God, to Jesus 
Christ, to the Kingdom. Here he stands in a religious fel¬ 
lowship, but also in the solitude where no one else can 
accompany him — the solitary moment of personal deci¬ 
sion, when his life is being wagered on his faith, the point 
where he touches infinity and where the accumulated life 
and wisdom of the community reach out through him 
towards the limitless. At that point, some attitudes must 
prevail — if there be conflict — in order for decision to 
take place. The crucial question is, what attitudes shall 
prevail? 

Here the meaning of the life of the Kingdom of God 
becomes clear. It is not any specified organization of so¬ 
ciety, but a basic complex of attitudes built around a faith 
in God and in human destiny. When Jesus taught that 
if we want the Kingdom of God we must live as though 
it were here and we shall find that it is here, this would 
seem to be what he meant. If the attitudes which govern 
your life are the attitudes of the Kingdom, the institutions 
of society (die Ordnungeri) will have those attitudes built 
into them, and when this is done the society will have be¬ 
come the Kingdom. When — Ah, there’s the rub! For 
we are asked to live in terms of the attitudes of the King¬ 
dom when it is not really here. Here is the decisive ques¬ 
tion for Christian ethics. It is also the decisive question 
for the relations of church and community. 

Having defined community in terms of a set of common 
attitudes among a people (a populace), we now see that 
the basic conflict for the church appears just here. A man 
must choose whether to be a member of a group at the 
level of its accepted assumptions, or at a deeper level where 


Church and Community 


1 9° 

these assumptions are subjected to scrutiny. At the deeper 
level, he will find himself estranged from many of his com¬ 
patriots who regard him as a deserter. He has deserted the 
shallows for the depths. Only at those depths can he now 
think about his life and his duty in the community. Every 
item takes on new depth of meaning. At this new level the 
church can meet him, if it will, with its own profundities 
of insight. It can tell him of God, it can ask him to probe 
deeper, it can offer him a fellowship of those who are both 
seekers for the depths and doers of the Word, it can chal¬ 
lenge him with Jesus Christ to live the attitudes of the 
Kingdom of God here and now. If he find such a church 
— and God grant that we may be enabled to offer it to 
him — he will promptly be embroiled in conflict at those 
points where Christian faith and the demands of his com¬ 
munity are in conflict. At such a time, he can be steadied 
by his faith that the demands of the community can ulti¬ 
mately be fulfilled only when it submits itself to that fate 
which is written into the structure of the world for human 
life. Then he can turn again and find his place among his 
own people, willing to lose his life for the Kingdom’s sake, 
that the community may learn to know the law of its own 
destiny. 

The church stands in relation to community, then, as a 
fellowship of faith — of a faith which is a commitment of 
life in the spirit (the attitudes) of the Kingdom. In its 
own life it should exemplify those attitudes and foster them 
in its members, that, being strengthened in the inner man, 
they may go forth into the community with devotion and 
power to guide the life of the community. By its own life, 
the church should continually point beyond its fellowship 
to the realities which it has sensed, and which it believes 
are the foundation for all human life, whether in the 
church or in the community. 


CHURCH AND COMMUNITY IN 
THE UNITED STATES 

by 

H. Paul Douglass 






/ 




t 

































CHURCH AND COMMUNITY IN 
THE UNITED STATES 


A country road stretches along a low ridge facing broad 
marshes, and distantly glimpsing the sea. Some thirty 
homes face the road over a distance of three miles. Their 
farm-lands back into the forest. In these homes and on 
these lands dwell perhaps a hundred and fifty people — 
men, women, young and old, intimately related in the busi¬ 
ness of living. 

From the viewpoint of the science of society they consti¬ 
tute a rural primary group. At the roots of civilization of 
the United States lie several millions of such groups, some 
larger, others smaller. Their land base, the area defined 
as a neighborhood, is often determined by topographic iso¬ 
lation. It is physically linked by a system of roads. The 
people frequently constitute a kindred group; they may 
be also linked by the ties of a particular race or common 
antecedents as immigrants from another country. They 
share and maintain common institutions, most frequently 
church, school, and economic enterprises. They also share 
noninstitutionalized interests of a social and economic sort. 
They operate rudimentary forms of government. 

Such a neighborhood is a fragmentary community. Its 
people cherish the “ we ” attitude and sentiment. From 
childhood they unconsciously participate in an invisible 
unity of shared experience which binds the little group to¬ 
gether and distinguishes it from all others. Within this 
narrow circle, a common “ definition of the situation ” is 
possessed by all. The neighbor feels at home within the 

193 


Church and Community 


194 

accepted conventions and roles of the neighborhood circle. 
He knows, without telling, what behavior response to 
bring to every situation. Even in the next neighborhood 
he is a stranger, lacking the distinct sense of place and of 
easy familiarity in personal relationships which he has at 
home. Underneath his habitual level of consciousness lies 
a deep sense of dependence, both physical and spiritual, 
upon the neighborhood environment. 

The most essential distinction commonly insisted upon 
by sociologists is that community means the sharing by 
people of the general business of life and the generalized 
forms of conduct. The community must, therefore, com¬ 
mand interest varied enough for complete life. It must be 
able within itself to satisfy all the essential common inter¬ 
ests of collective existence. For this definition of commu¬ 
nity the neighborhood is too narrow. 

Neighborhood generally possesses, however, one of the 
most basic characteristics of complete community; namely, 
the maintenance of common institutions. Three out of 
four neighborhoods in the United States are definitely 
built about common institutions. These furnish the cen¬ 
tral ties, to which the ties of family or race or unorganized 
neighborly activity are contributory. And of these insti¬ 
tutions, it is the church which is, by far and away, the most 
frequent primary core of the associated life. In the United 
States, at least, active neighborhood groupings on a reli¬ 
gious basis are decidedly preponderant. 

Sociology defines the church broadly as one of the major 
cultural concretions of society, showing relative rigidity 
and persistence. This simply means that the characteristic 
life of the social group habitually and continuously mani¬ 
fests itself in this form. 

Scientifically speaking, the invariable marks of the 
church seem to be the following: It is a permanent group- 


H. Paul Douglass 


195 

ing of people possessed of the “ we ” sentiment in the field 
of religion, together with their reciprocating attitudes to¬ 
ward one another and the conventional behavior patterns 
which they hold in this field. The church group also in¬ 
variably has and holds in common certain cultural objects 
of symbolic value, highly charged with emotion and senti¬ 
ment. It is a communion in holy things; for Christians the 
Bible, the sacraments, the cross. The church group almost 
invariably also possesses cultural objects of utilitarian value. 
Its spiritual enterprises require material facilities so that 
it becomes a communion in real estates and buildings, as 
well as in holy things. Its property and other material pos¬ 
sessions constitute a most powerful bond of union. Finally, 
the church possesses language symbols, either oral or writ¬ 
ten, expressing rationalized patterns in the realms of 
thought and conduct. It has a creed and a code, whether 
or not formally expressed. 

In the simplest and most generic case, the one which has 
characterized the majority of human lives from the race’s 
beginning, the neighborhood community and its institu¬ 
tions have been the chief bearers of social heredity. Nearly 
all of the particular transactions of culture and religion 
occur corporately within these face-to-face relations. The 
religious person, for example, has no direct contact with 
the great religious association as a whole. The church uni¬ 
versal does not touch him. 

But in the church parochial such things happen as these: 
A child grows up in a wooded countryside where popula¬ 
tion has long been dwindling. The church is open only 
for the two months of the short summer. Memory now 
interrogates childhood from the beginning to the end, and 
can recall not a single articulate word of religion which was 
significant. No article of the church’s teaching was clothed 
with emotional convincingness or power; what did might- 


Church and Community 


196 

ily impress the child was the strange behavior of adults in 
church. Here were familiar hands known as for ever grasp¬ 
ing — the ax, the spade, the reins, the oar, which sowed, 
reaped, washed, mended, weeded, kneaded, knitted, but 
which lay passive in church, relaxed, quiet. Faces were 
smoothed, voices made gentle. What was this strange other 
dimension of adult life, belonging to the high, still, white 
meetinghouse, which put tense and knotted hands at rest? 
What was this mystery of the neighborhood’s other self, the 
church? No other experience of early life posed so impres¬ 
sive and intriguing a question. 

For however inarticulately felt, one could not fail, some¬ 
how, to sense the extraordinary extension of the social 
group implied in unique adult behavior in the church. 

Another child is born on the prairie two decades after 
the first turning of the sod by the tools of man. When he 
is five or six the church is twenty-five years old. On this, 
the anniversary of the first significant span of its life, the 
community remembers its dead from the beginning of the 
settlement. The church has no stained glass in its windows, 
only colored panels of oiled paper pasted on clear glass. 
On other strips of paper, the country newspaper prints the 
names of the dead in heavy black type. They in turn are 
pasted across the windows, and beneath them these words: 

Let saints below in concert sing 
With those to glory gone, 

For all the servants of the King 
In earth or heav’n are one. 

One family we dwell in Him, 

One church, above, beneath; 

Tho’ now divided by the stream. 

The narrow stream of death. 

Here was a symbolic transaction which projected the 
remote group of prairie folk into an unseen world. A 


H. Paul Douglass 


197 

definition of the social situation was set forth from which 
flowed a sense of appropriate conduct different in quality 
from that sanctioned on the everyday level. 

Herein the church is unique: it alone of societies ex¬ 
pands its corporate relationships to include a second 
world. It 

postulates a supra-social form of relationship which within the 
religious assembly prescribes the social relations of the mem¬ 
bers. The church is a form of association in which men enter 
into relations with one another ostensibly determined by the 
prior relationship to nonhuman being or beings; for Chris¬ 
tians with God or the saints in light . 1 

Indelible and determinative things then are happening 
generation after generation within hundreds of thousands 
of face-to-face communities and religious groups and not 
elsewhere. Here and in the family the major part of the 
social tradition of the group is actually communicated. All 
the more meaningful and more powerful significances of 
religion and the religious expansion of the sphere of social 
relationships are corporately present in their bosom. In 
brief, sociologically speaking, the neighborhoods are the 
essence of community, while, religiously speaking, the 
churches are the church. 

The sharing of life in the realm of religion which con¬ 
stitutes the church is always a part, greater or smaller, of 
the shared common business of life which constitutes the 
community. Hence the most natural way to identify the 
church is to give it the name of the community. This may 
be merely a means of identifying location without imply¬ 
ing any moral affinity — as when an apostle writes, “ The 
Church of God in Corinth or may intend to imply some 
inner identification as well as a legal connection of church 
and community, as when one says, “ The Church of Scot- 

1 Maclver, Society, Its Structure and Changes (New York, 1931), p. 237. 


Church and Community 


198 

land.” For the church, however, society reaches upward as 
well as outward. Hence a curious alternation goes on as 
to the naming of churches. One gets a religious designa¬ 
tion, the name, say, of a saint or of a saintly quality; another 
a place designation, say the name of a city street. These 
alternations witness to the church’s consciousness that it 
stands in dual social relations, of which it remembers now 
one, now the other. 

This paper proposes to recognize both universal aspects 
of the church’s conscious relationships. In its description 
and preliminary analysis it will adopt the immediate view¬ 
point and methodology of science. This means that it will 
chiefly explore the relation of the churches to human com¬ 
munities of which they are visibly parts, without raising 
the question of the truth of their religious assumptions. 

It is, however, to be noted that the admission of such 
phenomena as the communion of saints with a spiritual 
Lord and with fellow saints in an unseen world into the 
universe of scientific description enlarges the scope of fac¬ 
tors to be discussed, however naturalistically. But it does 
more: it changes the impression of balance derived from 
the total phenomena. Given this definition of the situa¬ 
tion, ritual observances become direct forms of social in¬ 
teraction between participants in a corporate life, and may 
thus possess social utility as well as social propriety. Ethics 
remains essentially related to religion and worship is com¬ 
prehended as the celebration of the ultimate values of the 
total religious society on earth and in the heavens. This 
viewpoint crowns worship as the supreme function of the 
church even from a naturalistic standpoint. 

It is further proposed in this paper to approach problems 
of the community and the church concretely. An attempt 
will be made to keep throughout the sense of the variety 
of shared experience suggested in the introductory para- 


H. Paul Douglass 


199 

graphs and to maintain clear consciousness of the specific 
situations out of which the concepts “ community ” and 
“ church ” have been built up. Its descriptive phases will 
deal exclusively with the United States, leaving it to others 
to judge how far its consequent generalizations may apply 
to the modern world as a whole. At the outset, therefore, 
it will be concerned with church and communities rather 
than with the church and the community. Throughout, it 
will try to keep abstract notions in the closest possible con¬ 
tact with social realities. 

After a sketch of the stages of church history in the 
United States, comes an exploration of some of the more 
obvious aspects of the relations of the American national 
community as a whole toward the church, especially the 
Protestant church considered as a single entity, one of the 
great associations of our times. 

The paper then proceeds to follow the evolving relations 
of the more primary and authentic communities, the rural 
neighborhoods, towns, and cities, with their respective 
churches. It leaves to other hands the more ambitious task 
of theorizing concerning the relations of a logical or imagi¬ 
native model of an ecumenical church with the super¬ 
community of Western Christendom and its missionary 
provinces, or of a possible church universal with a final 
world order of human society. 

1. MORE GENERAL RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH 
TO THE AMERICAN NATIONAL COMMUNITY 

This broad field of relationship is now to be explored 
briefly in four sections as follows: (1) the history of the 
church in the United States; (2) the current status of the 
church; (3) the religious self-classification of the popula¬ 
tion and their adherence to the organized church; and (4) 
the prevalence, content, and quality of popular religion. 


200 


Church and Community 


In all these aspects the churches collectively are treated un¬ 
der the form of the church related to a corresponding in¬ 
clusive collectivity, the national social group or society. 

The obvious epochs of the church’s history in the United 
States are those of the life of the nation itself. 

The local colonial Churches had originated as definitely 
communal institutions. They became the religious estab¬ 
lishments of the incipient states. As voluntary organiza¬ 
tions they had ceased to be successful. 

At the end of the American colonial period probably 
less than five per cent of the population belonged actively 
to the church. 2 Historians offer many explanations of this 
low state of religion after a hundred and fifty years. They 
are generally unconvincing. 

Its profounder explanation is probably to be found in 
the incongruous variety of elements entering into the 
makeup of most colonial settlements and their preoccupa¬ 
tion with the struggle to make a living in a new world. For 
one colonial community founded by a homogeneous re¬ 
ligious group, ten were composed of heterogeneous, con¬ 
flicting, and often cantankerous elements. A majority of 
the population was not in harmony with state-established 
and supported churches prevailing in the majority of colo¬ 
nies up to the Revolutionary War. Minority sects main¬ 
tained their own churches, but at a feeble level. The best 
that all religious forces combined could do, under the com¬ 
munal traditions of religion, for four million people, 
amounted to some three thousand local churches of about 
thirty denominations, to which not one person in twenty 
gave active adherence. 

The next fifty years — the early national period — 
tripled the proportion of enrolled church members in the 
United States, but registered great cultural losses for or- 

2 Sweet, Story of Religions in America (New York, 1930), pp. 322 f. 


H. Paul Douglass 


201 


ganized religion. Every aspect of life of the infant nation 
showed a tremendous release of new energies under stimu¬ 
lus of opportunity for the common man. Their energies 
reached an all-time climax in the epic of westward expan¬ 
sion. Home, school, and church became cultural focuses 
of a new civilization rapidly forming behind the frontier. 
Church support on a purely voluntary basis, which re¬ 
quired membership to be individually recruited, church 
extension and church building became characteristic 
features of communal and national enterprise. Under de¬ 
centralized lay initiative, with the backing of organized 
denominational missionary impetus, the church drove 
ahead. But its frontier expression was exceedingly crude. 
Standards of ministerial education became terribly de¬ 
based. Revivalism triumphed over the colonial church 
tradition and flourished as the accepted means of religious 
progress for a hundred years. Despite multiplying sec¬ 
tarian differences, it created a common Protestant intellec¬ 
tual and emotional type. The church had learned how to 
succeed under conditions of the newly emerging farm and 
village culture. Some twenty-five thousand churches of 
seventy-five denominations had been founded by 1835. 

The succeeding century was one of institutional progress 
for the American church, which has been continuous to the 
present day. The church has successfully kept up momen¬ 
tum and utilized techniques developed in the previous fifty 
years. Later coming immigrant populations of all races 
found it relatively easy to build on foundations laid by 
pioneers. They have escaped the bare-handed struggle 
with the wilderness without major tools of civilization, and 
were able to transplant their respective religious cultures 
with less change or impoverishment than firstcomers could. 
Now immigrants have rapidly reinforced the religious re¬ 
sources of the nation. By 1890 the nation had a hundred 


202 


Church and Community 


sixty-five thousand churches (the Protestant denomina¬ 
tions particularly having greatly overshot the mark in 
creating small local organizations) and 25 per cent of the 
population was voluntarily enrolled in their membership. 

But the end of the farm and village era was at hand. The 
urbanization of the nation came rapidly on. In spite of its 
tremendous tensions, however, religious enterprise had 
only to persist in order to keep up with national growth. 
It was now easier to conserve gains. Heretofore all ener¬ 
gies had been bent to foundation building; now there was 
some surplus of energy to go into improved quality of 
church life. The church became qualitatively more ade¬ 
quate for its task than ever before. 

It is hard, sometimes, to realize that the church in the 
United States is now at its numerical peak. During the 
first third of the twentieth century a higher ratio of church 
members to population was reached than ever before. 
Now over 50 per cent of the people have enrolled them¬ 
selves in its ranks — ten times the ratio which existed at the 
beginning of the nation. Membership has maintained it¬ 
self substantially at this level for the last three decades. 
Gains in financial resources and property have been even 
more spectacular. Historically speaking, according to 
these more external indices at least, the church is revealed 
as a progressive and relatively successful institution, which 
is now to be considered in some of its contemporary phases. 

One of the obviously important phases concerns the cur¬ 
rent rate of the church’s growth. Ten years away, as the 
present year is, from the last government census of religious 
bodies, some uncertainty attaches to this point. However, 
the religious statisticians are doing their best to reach a 
dependable judgment by use of denominational returns 
pieced out by estimates. They believed that as of January 
1, 1934, the church membership of the United States stood 


H. Paul Douglass 


203 

at about 60,812,000, this representing an average gain of 
one and one-sixth per cent per year for a seven-year period. 
Population is estimated as having grown at the rate of one 
per cent per year for this period, so that the church was 
apparently considerably more than keeping up even dur¬ 
ing the depression or, as some think, rapidly growing partly 
on account of it. 

Another highly significant phase of the church's current 
situation is its improved capacity for the conservation of ad¬ 
herents. The declining birth rate gives the church fewer 
children of its own to draw on. Yet the increase in church 
membership is now keeping up with or exceeding the 
growth of population. Growth under these circumstances 
can only be accounted for either by greater evangelizing 
energy or by greater success in conservation. It is known 
that the evangelistic index — the number of converts per 
year per thousand church members — has somewhat de¬ 
clined. This leaves conservation to explain growth. In 
spite of the extraordinary present mobility of the American 
population, both rural and urban, the present losses to the 
church from social change are undoubtedly less than those 
which accompanied the still vaster shifting of populations 
numbering millions from the Old World to the New, and 
from settled colonial areas to the frontier during the first 
two and a half centuries of American history. 

Contradicting this apparent demonstration of the 
church’s ability to stand up against the community’s 
changes, one knows that when change is really acute, a 
church’s growth and property are vitally determined by the 
social fortunes of the locality with which it is associated 
even in an attenuated sense. Dr. Ross Sanderson has 
proved this statistically for about two thousand churches in 
sixteen American cities by painstakingly comparing the 
social quality and trends of the neighborhoods with the 


Church and Community 


204 

growth of the churches for a decade in membership, Sun¬ 
day school, and financial support. The exceptions found 
were not real exceptions — most of them proved the rule 
— and neither piety nor wit could make the result other¬ 
wise. 

Similar evidence of this is found on a nation-wide scale. 
The seven most religious states in the union, as measured 
by the proportion of the population in church member¬ 
ship, have gathered on the average 73 per cent of their 
adult population into the church rolls; the seven least re¬ 
ligious (by this same criterion) only 30 per cent. How 
comes it that one group of states is nearly two and a half 
times as much addicted to church membership as another? 
No one in his senses would maintain that there is any such 
degree of discrepancy in Christian belief or ethical con¬ 
duct. The examination of statistical correlations, one 
after another, between church membership and a wide 
range of social factors, clears up the mystery. The popula¬ 
tion of the seven most religious states grew less than 40 per 
cent during the thirty-year period 1900-1930, and only 
12.5 per cent of the total was born outside of the state of 
residence. The seven least religious states increased their 
population three times as fast during the same period and 
one-half of their total was born outside of the state of resi¬ 
dence. The more slow-growing, stay-at-home a popula¬ 
tion, the more religious; the faster-growing and more het¬ 
erogeneous, the less religious. All the rest of the states have 
many members in proportion as they were slow and steady, 
few in proportion as they are progressive and mobile. It 
is a matter of the degree and rapidity of social change and 
the resulting composition of population. 

Nothing, perhaps, comes nearer to being a law of cor¬ 
porately organized religion than that there will always be a 
lag between the institutional progress of the church and 


H. Paul Douglass 


205 

the more acute processes of social change. The church 
cannot immediately catch up when the tempo of change 
is too rapid, or its movement too great. The out-working 
of this law largely defines the gross relations of church and 
national community as a contemporary situation. 

The outstanding initial impression which one gets of the 
church when it is viewed locally on one-at-a-time glimpses, 
is that of the various grades and varieties of the adherence 
groupings which it represents. Attempting to carry out 
measurement in the basic terms of membership, one comes 
upon the fact that church membership constitutes by no 
means a simple concept. 

The typical church maintains a local roll of members. 
The turned-over corner of a card may distinguish the 
active from the inactive, and a blue pencil mark the resi¬ 
dent from the nonresident. Someone in the church will 
have a list of Sunday school pupils, and this list may or may 
not show which of them are church members. Various 
membership lists of subsidiary organizations, societies, and 
clubs will be found in the hands of their respective officers, 
but are assembled as one list. The financial authorities of 
the church will have their subscription list and roll of other 
supporters. The frequency of attendance of individuals 
will rarely be recorded, and there will be little agreement 
as to what constitutes regularity. The church can give 
some fairly definite account of its “ regular ” attendance, 
but what constitutes regularity? 

Again, some of the listings of memberships are obviously 
those of determinate adherents, that is to say, persons 
whose relationship to the church is specifically defined as 
identification with this or that organization or activity. 
They define certain more or less permanent groups which 
together constitute the nucleus of the church. Other list¬ 
ings are of indeterminate adherents, persons with whom the 


206 


Church and Community 


church feels some tie without being able to give a uniform 
reason for the feeling. Some denominations count bap¬ 
tized children as church members; all recognize younger 
minors as in some sense identified with the religious status 
of their parents. Churches which emphasize the rite of 
confirmation try to exercise recognized responsibility for 
all confirmed persons in their parishes. Others identify an 
all-defined group of “ persons under pastoral care/' As 
church programs develop, sponsored groups appear — for 
example, Boy Scouts or various clubs — which are in the 
church rather than of it. Still another type of adherence 
is represented by the church’s clients and dependents, per¬ 
sons to whom it more or less statedly brings charitable or 
other assistance but with whom it may have no other tie. 

As the sum of all these relationships the church has be¬ 
come widely diffused throughout the community. As it 
has diffused, the closeness and the significance of the 
average relationship has dwindled. The actual identifica¬ 
tion with his church of the average determinate adherent 
to his church in country, town, or city is relatively slight. 
An urban church which offers a person of a given age or 
sex from six to a dozen possible ways of being connected 
with it — for example, by church membership, Sunday 
school enrolment, regularity of attendance, pledged finan¬ 
cial support, membership in this and that subsidiary organ¬ 
ization— still finds that a round half of its members 
belong to it in only one of these capacities and that his 
participation in that one is irregular. About one-fourth 
have two connections and only one-fourth more than two. 
Children naturally form the larger proportion of one- 
connection adherents. Adolescents, on the contrary, lead 
in proportion of cases of from three to five connections 
with the church. 

No generally accepted definition of regular attendance 


H. Paul Douglass 


207 

exists. Six large city churches, with aggregate constitu¬ 
encies of eleven thousand, five hundred persons, claimed 
only 21 per cent even of their full members as regular 
attendants at services. In the case of fourteen hundred 
Congregational churches, which kept records on a seven- 
year period previous to 1936, the recorded figure was 25 
per cent. 

It must also be recalled that many of these dangling ad¬ 
herents are not communicant members at all. On an ex¬ 
tensive sampling, involving 46,726 determinate adherents 
of twenty-six large city churches, only 57 per cent of the 
total was represented by full church membership. Some of 
the subsidiary organizations to which the others belong may 
indeed be little more than the essentially extraneous group¬ 
ings of all but nonadherent persons. Their relationship to 
the church is so remote and tenuous as hardly to count at 
all religiously, unless some magic is ascribed to the mere act 
of belonging to any sort of church organization. 

At the other extreme one finds from five to seven per 
cent of the adherents of a group of rather highly organized 
churches who have five or more determinate attachments 
to them. These much-connected people include the 
church’s genuine and responsible “ pillars,” but are even 
more apt to be composed of religious hangers-on — per¬ 
sons deficient in other human relationships who find the 
church the easiest sphere for the repeated expression of 
their personalities. 

Formal church membership accounts for the 56 per cent 
of the nation’s population above thirteen years of age. 
What of the other 44 per cent? A good many of them — 
no one knows just how many — are the secondary mem¬ 
bers and indeterminate adherents just described. 

But beyond the furthermost boundaries of the church’s 
records or knowledge fall multitudes of persons unknown 


208 


Church and Community 


to any church who, nevertheless, cherish their own private 
sense of adherence to some sort of religion. However little 
the church may value such nebulous ties — ties subjec¬ 
tively recognized but not publicly acted upon — it is of 
the highest importance for the understanding of modern 
societies to know that virtually everybody in the United 
States or Canada professes attachment to some religious 
faith and classifies himself accordingly. The Canadian 
government asks this question as a matter of course in its 
regular census, and only about one-half of one per cent of 
all Canadians are unable or unwilling to answer. In 
American cities also, whenever individuals have been in¬ 
terrogated by the tens of thousands, as they have been in 
house-to-house canvasses, scarcely anyone is to be found 
unwilling to declare himself either a Protestant, a Catholic, 
a Jew. 

Furthermore, nearly all Protestants identify themselves 
as having an inner attachment or preference for some par¬ 
ticular sect or denomination. In the extensive Springfield, 
Massachusetts, survey, for example, only one-tenth of the 
Protestants did not know what particular denomination 
they preferred. In other words, there is not only universal 
attachment to a particular faith, but an almost equally 
widespread acknowledgment of particular sectarian ante¬ 
cedents and leanings. 

These more indeterminate adherents are not now, by 
their personal behavior, in active or acknowledged connec¬ 
tion with the church. Yet toward all, together with adults 
belonging to the families of active members, the church 
extends at least a diluted sense of responsibility and offers a 
range of service which is more or less clearly responded to 
by the persons concerned. 

Any complete account of the church as an association 
must obviously include both the central and the marginal 
type of adherents. It must determine how far the ties of 


H. Paul Douglass 


209 

association actually react, and consider how far beyond all 
versions of deliberate association population may be re¬ 
lated to the church on a communal level. 

For the United States in general, no figures exist to show 
how wide is the margin between the total number of per¬ 
sons listed by all the churches put together (either as de¬ 
terminate or as indeterminate adherents) and the total 
population which classifies itself according to faith and 
sect. While, however, the United Church of Canada re¬ 
ports some one million, six hundred thousand persons 
under pastoral care, over two million report themselves as 
conscious adherents of that church — a fifth more than 
the church knows about. Typical city surveys in the 
United States would place this marginal group at the equiv¬ 
alent of 25 per cent of enrolled memberships. Finally, 
even beyond this marginal group, in Canada three times as 
many persons on the average report themselves as church 
adherents, at least in the classificatory sense, to particular 
faiths as all the churches combined record as full communi¬ 
cant members. Such a ratio applied to the Protestants in 
the United States would identify virtually the entire pop¬ 
ulation as adherent in some sense to some religious group. 

When one makes an actual close examination of any 
total population, the actual characteristics of Protestant 
nonadherents, as proved by numerous surveys, turn out to 
be the following: First they consist of transient elements 
of population or people with corresponding mental atti¬ 
tudes. Thus, in a virtually complete survey of a suburb 
of fourteen thousand people, about one-third of the Prot¬ 
estant unchurched was found to consist of school teachers, 
domestic servants and industrial workers living in board¬ 
inghouses. Without deep roots in the community, such 
groups are hard to combine with normal family constit¬ 
uents of the average residential church. 

When the transient nonadherents are subtracted, a re- 


210 


Church and Community 


siduum is left, possibly including two-thirds of the Prot¬ 
estant unchurched, which, in social characteristics, differs 
in no essential particular from the churched population, 
except that the individuals composing the group are some¬ 
what older in years and on the whole poorer. One im¬ 
mediate common-sense hypothesis is that the relative lack 
of small children in this group may, perhaps, explain its 
failure to keep in touch with the church. The financial 
burden of membership may also be a factor. 

In this particular case, the entire body of Protestant 
ministers was assembled and confronted with the residuary 
list. One minister would begin to say to another that he 
had always understood that this or that family in question 
belonged to the other’s church, and had not felt at liberty 
to approach it for fear of being charged with proselytizing. 
A limited house-to-house canvass in this connection con¬ 
firmed the reputation of many such persons. Their neigh¬ 
bors credited them with possessing some religious leaning 
or shadowy affiliation with some particular church. They 
were nevertheless outside of the most generous version of 
the church’s own adherent lists. 

Now people displaced from normal relations by reason 
of social transiency, or whose energies are waning by reason 
of age or discouragement, drop out of other relations be¬ 
sides those of the church. Many a life is lived in the sense 
of values carried over from the past after the particular 
ties by which values were actively established have van¬ 
ished. But may not then large numbers of the unchurched 
represent the church’s alumni — “ old boys ” out of school 
but retaining real sentimental attachment to the church of 
their youth? 

From a purely objective standpoint, and as viewed real¬ 
istically and in detachment by the student of society, it is 
obvious that all the relationships taken together make up 


H. Paul Douglass 211 

the actual grouping and association which must be recog¬ 
nized as the church. 

What significance each of these ways of adhering has, 
how they are related to one another, and in what sense 
they may combine into a single picture of nearer or re¬ 
moter attachment to an institution which is religious as 
well as social, one has to discover by further painstaking 
exploration. Do they find their unity in a time sequence, 
in the sense that the individual’s typical course is to come 
first to a remoter church relationship, then be brought 
into closer and closer ones, and then to fall out of more 
active participation, largely because of age and general in¬ 
elasticity? Does the body of indeterminate adherents con¬ 
stitute a reservoir from which determinate adherents, so to 
speak, are ladled out? Does one go from the Sunday school 
into the church and progress from occasional attendance 
into regularity? In this sense, many of the unchurched con¬ 
stitute the church’s future membership which will come 
along in time, as well as to alumni whose loyalties are 
dimmed but not quenched. 

An additional feature of the situation, made crucial by 
certain denominations, is that multitudes of such persons 
return to the church in the important crises of life and 
look to the church in the last extremity. Birth, marriage, 
and death return them to its sacraments. Under urban 
conditions churches which maintain open offices for con¬ 
sultation or programs offering varied forms of social service 
will be sought out by many of these unchurched as casual 
or intermittent clients. Such occasional attachments need 
not be wholly without positive significance even when 
from the church’s standpoint they seem remote, selfish, 
parasitic, and onesided. 

To sum up the whole matter: nonadherents include a 
scant few of professedly irreligious persons but represent 


212 


Church and Community 


in the main persons who definitely think of themselves as 
related to the church, who stand subjectively so near to the 
institution that they differ but little from the majority of 
determinate adherents — adherents whose connection is 
characteristically tenuous and whose participation is in¬ 
termittent. In other words, the unchurched constitute 
one-half of a normal distribution curve covering a total 
population, the middle case of which is represented by an 
adherent to the church by one connection, but who is not 
regular either in participation or in support. As closeness 
of attachment to the church increases, the number of ad¬ 
herents diminishes, the series ending with a few who are 
bound to the church by many ties to balance the few defi¬ 
nitely irreligious at the other end of the scale. 

All these diverse adherent groupings constitute ways of 
associating through the church, and each has its own sig¬ 
nificance. Regarding the church religiously as an organ 
of salvation, one may puzzle as to just which one establishes 
the crucial saving relationship to God. Protestantism, 
however, laying as it does only secondary stress on member¬ 
ship in the external institution, ought to be in a position 
to deal with these phenomena of adherent and nonadher¬ 
ent association in a frank and illuminating way. They 
show that the church has values for wide constituencies 
which lack intimate and permanent ties with it. For all 
of them, the association actually functions in some meas¬ 
ure. Some of these constituents represented attitudes 
which are essentially reversions to the communal level of 
religion. Without being deceived as to the trivial spiritual 
significance of some of these ties, one need not despise the 
least of them. From the sociological standpoint at least, 
this series of increasing and decreasing attachments is an 
essential feature of the church’s place in society. 

Now not only do most Americans cherish attitudes 


H. Paul Douglass 


213 

which relate them, whether actively or passively, to the 
church as an institution; they also share the common con¬ 
ceptions of religious belief and conduct for which the 
church is presumed to stand. 

Religion, when it is privately held along with attitudes 
highly critical of the church, accepts a creed and a code 
closely reflecting the church’s own. 

The characteristics of this popular private religion are 
well known. The extensive, first-hand, and terribly dis¬ 
illusionizing and chastening studies of the religion of 
American soldiers during the World War closely paral¬ 
leled the results of studies in the British army. These all 
too quickly forgotten data, along with repeated question¬ 
naires and surveys, reveal that the masses of men in the 
American population are generally religious in an inartic¬ 
ulate way. They hold a shadowy faith in God and im¬ 
mortality; they respect the good but in their view un¬ 
practical Jesus, about whom they actually know almost 
nothing. Almost to the last man they pray in an emer¬ 
gency. They almost totally lack the concept of salvation 
from sin or the sense of the personal need of it. 

As soldiers, these men, the strength of the generation 
now in middle life, were full of denunciation of the church, 
with which the majority were not actively associated. It 
was attacked for coming so short of its proclaimed ideal, 
for its trivial external requirements and its unrelatedness 
to living problems. 

Yet nearly all of these soldiers under the draft represent¬ 
ing a true cross section of the population, confessed to hav¬ 
ing been under some sort of religious influence in child¬ 
hood; and they still regarded it as their prerogative “ to 
claim the functions of priest or clergyman in connection 
with a wedding or death.” 3 

s Religion among American Men, p. 31. 


Church and Community 


214 

Here, then, is the actual religion of American men, 
mostly Protestants, consisting of three elements: 

(1) A private religion, such inner reality as it has being 
essentially independent of attachment to the organized 

/ church. 

(2) A characteristic criticism of the church as imprac¬ 
tical, and as ineffective in behalf of its primary interest. 

(3) A one-way claim, that of the individual upon the 
church at the communal level, which birth into the Chris¬ 
tian community is assumed to convey. 

Such is popular religion as accepted by the unchurched 
American masses. Only by accommodation may it be 
called Christian. Yet in point of fact it is very much of a 
piece with the religion of the masses within the church. 
Theirs, too, bears all the typical marks — a private, inward¬ 
looking religion regarded as “ vital a very dangling ad¬ 
herence, as measured by active participation in the church 
as an institution; this coupled with rather acute criticism 
of the church’s shortcomings; in spite of which there is a 
very general resort to the viewpoint and offices of the 
church at the critical points in life. 

In short, the church turns out to be Protestantism’s 
whipping-boy, on whom all resentments over the failures 
of private religion tend to be visited, even when the essen¬ 
tial significance of the church in the realm of religion has 
been denied. 

Yet, even as American rather than in any clear-cut sense 
Christian, popular Protestantism does contribute strong 
backing to the role of the church in the community. It 
operates at a low level, but it does serve. Americans are 
enterprising; Americans are melioristic and willing to make 
something of any possible situation; Americans believe in 
progress. As enterprising they keep backing the church 
practically, within reason. They do try to improve it. 


H. Paul Douglass 


215 

Generally uncritical, they tend to evade most of its acute 
problems by the distinction between essentials and non- 
essentials. Essentials turn out to be the considerably 
attenuated religious notions to which most Americans 
assent. But even on this basis, a vast deal of piecemeal 
“ progress ” is possible. On the score of identity of view¬ 
point and doctrine very large segments of the American 
Protestant churches could be “ united ” at this level. 

Far enough away as they are from any sharply distinctive 
version of Christianity or any adequate conception of the 
genius of the more authentic religious processes, these con¬ 
tributions of popular religion stand as solid advantages and 
must be reckoned within any realistic understanding of 
the church’s contemporary situation. 

What exactly is “ religion ” in the popular version? As 
it appears in the data just presented, it is an area whose 
direction and magnitude are sensed rather than bounded, 
of which the following are characteristic features: (1) Cer¬ 
tain attitudes and appreciations drawn out into moods and 
sentiments as related to the awe-inspiring, the universally 
meaningful, and the holy. (2) It involves common sym¬ 
bols and observances, the mores of the religious tradition. 
(3) It includes beliefs, more or less explicitly and system¬ 
atically set forth in creed and code. (4) It eventuates in 
practical interests of the church at work. In brief, “ true 
religion ” is identified by certain emotional status, a cer¬ 
tain ideology and certain behavior, partly conventional, 
partly of immediate social utility. 

American “ Christians ” reinforce and validate these ele¬ 
ments of “ the religious ” by sensitiveness to values imply¬ 
ing rather numerous frames of reference. Some of the 
accepted values of popular religion are inward-looking, 
others outward-reaching; some are mystical, others ration¬ 
alistic; some definitely theistic in frame of reference, others 


2 l6 


Church and Community 


humanistic. Many derive from the general stream of re¬ 
ligion in the life of humanity; others are specifically and 
historically Christian. Sectarian affirmations and denials 
give a certain variety to the emphasis which one or another 
of these points of value gets; but the essential balance is 
maintained by the great majority of American church mem¬ 
bers and the unchurched alike. Any combination of em¬ 
phasis preserving the customary elements in something like 
their customary balance passes as “ Christian ” and indeed 
as “ evangelical ” in most American religious circles. This 
is the somewhat undiscriminating catholicity of popular re¬ 
ligion as deeply possessed by the national community. 

Can any tentative conclusion now be drawn from the 
tracing of the church in the history of the American com¬ 
munity, from its place in the contemporary scene, and 
from the phenomena of adherence and popular belief 
which have just been reviewed? 

Obviously, the American church is no longer a collec¬ 
tion of sects, essentially separated from and at war with 
society. Indeed, it has become a segment of society, quite 
like the rest. Still less in the persons of its individual mem¬ 
bers is it a collection of saints, that is, of individuals in¬ 
wardly distinguishable from the mass by a unique faith or 
by the peculiar graces of Christian character. This conclu¬ 
sion, perhaps, serves only to clothe the situation with fresh 
doubts and perplexities. However, an honest attempt has 
been made to present the pertinent phenomena. Further 
analysis may succeed in reaching more penetrating and 
orderly results. 

2 . AMERICAN COMMUNITIES AND THEIR CHURCHES 

In an attempt to trace the major specific correspondences 
between American communities and their churches, a start 
has already been made with the simplest type of commu¬ 
nity, the neighborhood. 


H. Paul Douglass 


217 

From the standpoint of social complexity the hierarchy 
of communities is obvious. Life as led by near neighbors 
in a hamlet is essentially conditioned at more points by 
social relations than life in the lone farmstead. The town, 
with its temporarily crowded main street at the hour of 
marketing or movies, strikingly contrasts with the hamlet. 
Again, the small city with its factories and possible single 
skyscraper stands in radical contrast with the town. Above 
all looms the big city. At any point up or down the scale, 
a doubling or trebling of population makes a more than 
appreciable difference, not alone in the externals of life: 
each strikes a new note in civilization. 

When it becomes necessary to ignore intermediate gra¬ 
dations, and to comprehend the entire range of structural 
forms of civilization as they are presented in communities 
from smallest to largest, popular usage distinguishes three 
grades: country, town, and city. Those are the primary 
colors in which civilization inclines to paint all its pictures. 

Each of the three grades has developed a corresponding 
type of church, reflecting the outworking of the same 
forces which have made the communities themselves 
different. 

Comprehending all three grades of communities is the 
nation, itself a community of a superior order, with which 
the preceding section has already concerned itself. The 
nation, in turn, is part of a somewhat vague culture-area 
community, and ultimately of a practically nebulous but 
ideally all-embracing world community. 

The neighborhood and its church have been described 
by anticipation in the introduction section. What remains 
to be noted is the marked decline of the American neigh¬ 
borhood in connection with a recent radical change in the 
pattern of rural society. 

Since 1910, the approximate beginning of the age of the 
automobile, the focus of rural America has conspicuously 


2 l8 


Church and Community 


shifted from the neighborhood to the village and town 
functioning as a service station for the outlying farms. 
Formerly a neighborhood meant the group of farm neigh¬ 
bors whose life has already been illustrated, each group 
typically provided with its country store, its school, its 
church, often its grange or lodge. These communal insti¬ 
tutions have been transferred to the town, one by one, 
sometimes one going first, sometimes another. The neigh¬ 
borhood farm group is left with depleted social resources. 
This process has been going on with acute rapidity 
throughout rural America. Such is the concrete reality 
behind the phrase, “ the breakdown of the neighborhood." 

It is chiefly the breakdown of the neighborhood which 
explains the death in recent years, in carefully surveyed 
representative areas of the United States, of from two to 
four per cent of all rural churches per year, to a total of 
perhaps a thousand to fifteen hundred per year the country 
over. 

Now the life of the neighborhood and its church looked 
back in the direction of a far simpler face-to-face grouping, 
namely, that of the primitive clan-village. Here was found 
the original form of permanent human grouping, that 
based on blood relationship without differentiation of 
interests. 

In their recent study of American neighborhoods, Brun¬ 
ner and Kolb 4 sought to find out under what auspices each 
habitual type of social event or gathering was held. A 
characteristic reply was: “ It’s hard to tell just which events 
are the grange’s. Everything is all together here. All the 
events are really community events.’’ This lack of clear 
distinction between auspices merely runs the story of the 
primary rural group in reverse, back to a stage in the devel¬ 
opment of society when all the specialized tendencies rep- 
* Recent Social Trends (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1933). 


H. Paul Douglass 


219 

resented in the modern world by separate institutional 
structures still remained in solution. None of the great 
associations or major institutions of society have as yet 
found separate existence. Government and education, 
like religion, were relatively indistinguishable functions of 
the whole community life and there was little economic 
specialization. 

This may be termed (1) the stage of communal customs 
— the fusion of political-economic-familial-religious cul¬ 
tural usages. The scheme of social differentiation, follow¬ 
ing this line of analysis, is marked by two other stages: 
(2) Differentiated communal institutions — the distinc¬ 
tive forms of each becoming relatively fixed and embodied 
in; and (3) differentiated associations — the family, the 
state, economic corporations, school, church, etc., arriving 
at full-fledged separate development. 

Now, up to the beginning of the present century, the 
American neighborhood remained essentially in the sec¬ 
ond of these stages; many times temporarily lapsing back 
into the first — as witness the pioneer patriarchal house¬ 
hold, the frontier Sunday school in lay hands, lynch law, 
and limited economic barter in connection with essentially 
subsistence farming. At all these points one sees the situa¬ 
tion under the control of reversions to communal custom 
and processes. 

By contrast, the spectacular reorganization of rural life 
around town centers, chiefly accomplished in the United 
States within a generation, represents an unprecedented 
speeding up of social evolution in the direction of full dif¬ 
ferentiation of social interests and their institutions; that 
is to say, their emergence into the third of the stages enu¬ 
merated above. 

This change shows itself in many ways. Town and vil¬ 
lage communities, for example, have relatively more stores 


220 


Church and Community 


in them now than in 1910 or 1920, and more kinds of 
stores; and a higher proportion of their population is en¬ 
gaged in merchandising. These facts indicate they are 
getting more farmer trade than formerly. Again, the pro¬ 
portion of farm youth in town and village high schools has 
been growing by leaps and bounds, regardless of whether 
or not school districts have been consolidated. Village 
social organizations, such as the luncheon clubs, musical 
groups, parent-teacher associations, and many others, now 
freely welcome farmers and their wives as members. In¬ 
deed, more than one-third of the membership of such vil : 
lage groups have come to be made up of open-country 
people. Ill-will and misunderstanding between village 
and country is far less in evidence today than in 1924 or 
even 1929. Active and continuing cooperation is frequent. 
In short, the rural community of today is a village or town 
centered one; literally, a town-country or “ rurban ” com¬ 
munity. Neighborhoods, when they still exist, are assum¬ 
ing more fragmentary and less important functions. 

What meaning has such change for the church? First, 
that more people have shifted their church allegiances as 
well as their economic and social ones. In 1920, according 
to a nation-wide sampling of rural communities, less than 
one-fourth of the members of village churches, and barely 
one in twenty of those in towns of twenty-five hundred to 
ten thousand populations, came from the open country. 
By 1930 the proportion was well over one-third in the case 
of the village and nearly one in four in the town churches. 
In some counties more than half the members of village 
and even of town churches now came from farm homes. 
This shifting of the center of church interests on the part 
of so many rural people from open country or neighbor¬ 
hood to village or town has weakened greatly the church 
in the country; and disproportionately so because it is 


H. Paul Douglass 


221 


the more competent and often wealthier members who in¬ 
cline to leave it for the church at the center. Very often 
it has moved the church itself, and relocated it on the edge 
of the growing town, to which it remains alien, rural in 
spirit, bowing in the house of the town Baal under com¬ 
pulsion only. Their struggle to get and to retain members 
has brought the churches, even though of the same denom¬ 
inations, newly into acute competition. It largely explains 
the heavy mortality of rural churches, already noted. 

But the decisive quality of the changes just described has 
not yet been adequately sensed. These external social 
changes get epochal meaning for the neighborhood church 
because they compel inward changes. Specifically, for the 
country they have involved a new principle of human 
association; while for the town they have greatly compli¬ 
cated an old one. 

To understand the significance of what has happened, 
one must consider that the relationships of the rural com¬ 
munity from the earlier social beginnings had concerned 
the same people over and over again. There were num¬ 
erous regroupings, but the basic personnel of the commu¬ 
nity did not change. The back-door or barnyard 
conversations and borrowings, meetings, and passings on 
the country road or village street, trade in the shops, social 
functions and occasions, organized life in school, lodge, and 
church, all recombined the same familiar faces in different 
connections. Marriage, occupation, economic opportu¬ 
nity, and everyday working philosophy, all had to be 
achieved within the limits of a few score of families, in¬ 
cluding a hundred or two persons. 

Suddenly now within the last quarter of a century, by 
means of improved transportation and the regrouping of 
rural population, the average rural person has had opened 
to him a wider range of human association than the 


222 


Church and Community 


countryman or village man has ever had since society be¬ 
came human, or at least since primitive hordes ceased to 
practice exogamy. 

Still more dramatic and tense has been the complex of 
urban social change focused in the great city. Not only 
does the city grow enormously but it grows according to 
an invariable pattern — by territorial expansion at the cir¬ 
cumference, by crowding and tall building at the center. 
Each element of urban activity competes with the others 
for space. The enlarged business and industrial areas 
crowd out residences. The generally poor and often for¬ 
eign colonies clustered about these centers are conse¬ 
quently thrust out into contiguous residential territory of 
higher economic quality. This invasion drives before it 
the former inhabitants who scatter among the yet better 
areas, adding to them, deteriorating them, and in turn 
evicting the previous populations, who ultimately take to 
the suburbs. Thus a given area sees a succession of popula¬ 
tions, perhaps also of nationalities and races. The palace 
of today is the slum of tomorrow. A “ Furnished Rooms 
for Rent ” sign ornaments the old Rockefeller homestead 
in Cleveland. Slum clearance and high-grade apartment 
house developments set up a counter movement in a few 
areas. But except as checked by zoning ordinances and 
partially stabilized by city planning, these successive waves 
of deterioration, initiated by displacements at the center 
and the obsolescence of the city’s older housing and facili¬ 
ties, tend to roll on and on. The mass of these movements 
is, of course, determined by the size of the city, and their 
violence is proportionate to its rate of growth. 

Within this continuously moving framework, the min¬ 
gling day after day of many diverse elements tends to ob¬ 
scure the permanent siftings of population. By and large, 
however, each district of the city ultimately comes to have 


H. Paul Douglass 


223 

its peculiar use and place in the pattern at any given mo¬ 
ment, and every inhabited area comes to represent a dis¬ 
tinct social and economic level of population. It is 
stabilized temporarily, but on a mere basis of economic 
sifting, which furnishes no genuine basis for human asso¬ 
ciation. 

For the continuous process of the remaking of cities is 
even more profoundly social than it is physical. Recur¬ 
rently driving him to new places of residence by the ra¬ 
pidity and violence of its changes, full-blown urbanization 
tends to give the adult city or suburban dweller a different 
set of fellows for every major relationship. The people 
near whom he lives are not those with whom he works, 
and when he plays it is with a still different group. Voca¬ 
tional and business specialization bring the individual into 
still other groupings: the trade, the profession, the group of 
fellow workers. Special cultural interests or avocations 
place him in the literary, the artistic, or the musical crowd. 
Recreation, sports and hobbies may each create an addi¬ 
tional set of associations. All of these separate groups of 
associates are acquainted with the man in only a fragment 
of his life. Of the rest of him they remain ignorant. He 
has manifold ties in many directions, but all relatively 
superficial. These associations are based on selective 
affinity rather than on contiguity in a self-contained neigh¬ 
borhood or upon the deeper ties of the racial group or 
family clan which originally caused people to settle near 
together. 

The siftings of city population into socially homogene¬ 
ous areas consequently do not create new neighborhoods, 
because the principle of neighborly association has departed 
from the situation. 

Finally, corresponding to these changes in terms of secu¬ 
lar association, the fellowship of the urban church, as 


Church and Community 


224 

evidenced by the typically slender affiliation of its average 
adherent, tends to be reduced to merely one of the many 
ties which persons detached from locality and, in great 
numbers, detached also from family, recognize with seg¬ 
ments of their personalities. Each segment expresses itself 
in a different setting and as a response to a different set 
of people and moral standards. This segmentation of cul¬ 
ture and substitution of multiple moral standards for a 
single standard is the essence of urbanization. Such ex¬ 
treme urbanization conspicuously dominates the associ¬ 
ated life of many large downtown churches and confronts 
corporate religion with a task of integration and discipline 
the like of which it has never before had to tackle in all its 
history. 

The churches now come to owe their very existence to 
the abandonment of neighborly religious relationships. 
More and more people turn away from their neighbor¬ 
hoods of residence to attend church at a distance. The 
urban situation exaggerates this tendency to the extent 
that, in numerous carefully surveyed instances, half or 
more of all church adherents are found attending church 
and finding religious fellowship outside of the areas con¬ 
tiguous to their homes, away from the neighborhood where 
their smaller children go to school, where their wives pat¬ 
ronize the corner grocery, and where their fellow citizens 
gather at the voting precinct. In the extreme case, not 
more than two or three per cent of a church’s constituency 
may live within a mile of it. Most city churches, however, 
retain some vestige of territorial parishes; the majority of 
their adherents are somewhat clustered about them, 
though in the most typical cases so diluted in actual num¬ 
bers that the church can have only the loosest community 
roots. Sunday school and subsidiary constituencies are 
more often drawn from contiguous areas than from general 


H. Paul Douglass 


225 

church memberships. But different constituencies may 
not only come from different distances but from quite dif¬ 
ferent directions — the Sunday school from one sector of 
the city, the chief membership from another. In short, 
many urban churches have not single but multiple con¬ 
stituencies. Even in the most homogeneous of residential 
neighborhoods, where social life within the contiguous 
group is most adequate, half of all churchgoers may be 
found marching out from under the very eaves of local 
sanctuaries, including those of their own denominations, to 
find church fellowships at distant centers. In extreme cases, 
almost the whole body of churchgoers of a locality thus 
take themselves out of their immediate neighborhoods to 
get to church. This indicates real maladjustment. How¬ 
ever, for half of the people of a neighborhood to go else¬ 
where to church has become only normal in many 
American cities. It may fairly be charged to the free and 
perhaps proper exercise of selective choice under urban 
conditions. The urban church thus is caught in a most 
complex and perplexing situation, whose factors must be 
further disentangled before the situation can be under¬ 
stood or in any way controlled. 

Made up as it is of people of such characteristics, no 
wonder that the church as an institution takes on corre¬ 
sponding behaviors. Most of its sense of specific territorial 
responsibility dwindles away. If it remains attached to 
locality, it is for its own sake, not for the sake of the 
community. 

In areas of rapid urban change, where old populations 
are being evicted, five general possibilities are open to the 
existing churches: (1) to die because of the diminished 
number of nearby adherents of the sort which the church 
formerly reflected; (2) to survive as churches of stranded 
minorities, which obviously will be able to maintain but 


226 


Church and Community 


few; (3) to move along to another location near to the type 
of population for which it has established affinity; (4) to 
adapt itself to meeting the special needs of some element 
in the incoming population and thus to rebuild the old in¬ 
stitution out of fresh but fragmentary materials; or (5) to 
maintain its location and draw adherents of the old sort 
from a distance. Only removal ordinarily permits a 
church to find a relatively homogeneous area in which 
it can reflect total community characteristics somewhat as 
the original parish church did; and here it will almost cer¬ 
tainly have to divide the advantage with rival churches. 
Considerable numbers of churches actually follow each of 
these alternatives. The story of urban church fortunes is 
dramatic as well as instructive. In typical cities one-fourth 
of all Protestant churches which ever existed have died. 
Most of the stranded ones live on only at a “ poor dying 
rate.” Especially interesting and thrilling is the history in 
typical cities of removals and attempted adaptations to 
changed communities. 

On the evidence of a thousand cases, three out of every 
four city churches do not continue upon the original cor¬ 
nerstone. They have moved at least once in their histories. 
Colonies of churches — often leaders of their respective 
denominations — have been neighbors and rivals in three 
or four different locations — each moving to the “ best ” 
new territory every time its old territory went bad. Many 
of the abandoned church buildings were sold to churches 
of the incoming populations, some of which were of the 
same denomination, but of other race or social level. 

Time does not permit the tracing of this process in fur¬ 
ther detail. It is obvious, however, that none of the pos¬ 
sibilities open to the urban church under the pressure of 
change prompt it to be continuously a community institu¬ 
tion in the sense that the neighborhood church was. All 


H. Paul Douglass 


227 

roads lead away from the close communal identification 
of the one with the other. 

At best, however, the process is incomplete. The situa¬ 
tion in all rapidly changing urban areas is muddled by the 
presence, in addition to the characteristic population of the 
moment, of stranded elements of departing populations 
and by the advance guard of populations still to come. 
This is especially the case, because population invasions 
take place along major transit routes, leaving a little off 
their routes eddies and pockets where the life of former 
days persists. In brief, areas in transition cannot be truly 
homogeneous in spite of their distinctly marked average 
levels. Many of the churches of a given locality accord¬ 
ingly represent mere fragments of populations. They 
were once churches of the community but that community 
has moved out from under them. 

In this group, too, are found the new enterprises, but 
born too late, with no understanding of the world into 
which they have come. Others are old and decrepit cases 
in which functions previously performed have been grad¬ 
ually lost as an old man loses his faculties. Careful studies 
have traced in detail the progressive narrowing of pro¬ 
grams of waning churches which find it impossible to keep 
up with the changes of their neighborhoods. 

In the cases of these fragmentary urban churches the 
influence of especially cramping tradition has also to be 
recognized. Extreme dogmatism and austerity of outlook 
keep their influence within the narrowest bounds. Cer¬ 
tain churches of foreign antecedents stand as monuments 
to the reactionary spirit. They do not, for example, give 
women the social freedom to which they are accustomed in 
American life. Consequently they fail to go along with 
the changing attitudes of the younger generation, which 
progressively abandons them. 


228 


Church and Community 


In contrast, under conditions generally of relatively 
ample resources, a liberal or experimental intellectual out¬ 
look and an advantageous social environment, one finds 
the local urban church in complete theoretical harmony 
with the newly developing principle of association by selec¬ 
tive affinity. A church of this type consciously elaborates 
its programs in response to the broadening and more fully 
differentiated cultural, social, and recreational interests 
of its varied groups of adherents. In its fullest develop¬ 
ment, it makes structural place for and tries to serve all 
the many-sided constructive expressions of life. In some 
loose sense it undertakes to organize these around a reli¬ 
gious core; but it provides for their expression in many 
separate organizations through graded activities adapted 
to each particular age group and to the peculiar needs of 
the two sexes. Often these groups are quasi-independent 
and at no time have they much in common. In its actual or¬ 
ganization, the church tends to subdivide the universe of 
the religious into independently numerous bits, each com¬ 
manding a piecemeal attachment of some of the church’s 
adherents, whose loyalties are to these attenuated second¬ 
ary interests rather than to any closely knit whole. Such a 
situation obviously precludes any successful attempt to ex¬ 
press the bond of the church’s union in a common credal 
formulation. The things which, in the first instance, unite 
the majority of associates in the church are the often super¬ 
ficial claims of these subsidiary concerns. One is apt to 
join the church as Scout troop, as aid society, as men’s club; 
not the church as church. The church is the opportunity 
for selective grouping on behalf of many things, rather 
than the common expression of the one supreme thing. 

Finally, conditioned by situations combining sufficient 
resources (often furnished by agencies outside the imme¬ 
diate church group), by a nontraditional attitude, and by 


H. Paul Douglass 


229 

the crying needs of an adverse special environment, a type 
of church appears in which an expanded interpretation 
of religion in organization and activity is made to reflect 
the special pressures of that environment. The result is a 
socially adapted church, definitely undertaking to become 
an agency of social ministry to especially handicapped pop¬ 
ulations. Such a church commonly maintains the tradi¬ 
tional activities of the church at the center of the 
enterprise, but adds to indefinite degree such health, rec¬ 
reational, and economic aids as the especially needy types of 
population may require. Such churches furnish extreme 
examples of subsidiary groupings for many purposes with 
little sense of belonging to the church as a whole or to its 
central purposes. Their secular activities often far exceed 
in bulk their religious ones. 

The church then, both rural and urban, is increasingly 
abandoning its former principle of association by com¬ 
munal contiguity and is increasingly basing itself, both in 
fellowship and in program, on selective affinity. Both are 
more and more dominated by a new inner principle of 
association very different from that which pertained when 
the same few men and women had all their common roots, 
political, economic, cultural, and religious, in a particular 
community. This shift is only slightly affected by the town 
church. 

The basic social pattern of town life has suffered no such 
radical change as that of the open country and village 
neighborhood, or that of the great city. The gathering of 
rural people about it as a service center has merely pro¬ 
vided material for somewhat ample relations of the sort it 
already had. True, the town is more changed in spirit 
than it is in structure, as part of the urbanization of society 
as a whole; but this registers as a loosening of old ties rather 
than as the introduction of a new principle of association. 


Church and Community 


230 

The town church consequently remains the most success¬ 
ful relative to its population. 

The villages and towns, especially in the distinctively 
agricultural areas, are proportionately almost twice as well 
evangelized as is the farming population. The twenty mil¬ 
lion people living in the villages and towns of the United 
States are unquestionably more unshaken in their tradi¬ 
tional loyalty to the Protestant church than any other 
group. They retain more of the communal identification 
of church and community. 

Pausing now for a brief review of the discussion up to 
this point, one may record somewhat as follows the first 
impression which the data tend to produce: 

Profound changes in the basis of human association are 
working themselves out in modern communities and in¬ 
stitutions, but not without many obstacles and crosscur¬ 
rents. Evolution has made no complete break with the 
past, and it is not yet certain how the conflict of forces will 
eventuate. 

By virtue of their distinctive environmental pressures, 
all types of communities create churches, superficially at 
least, in their own images, so that a list of such types con¬ 
stitutes a rough inventory of kinds of churches. 

There are, for example, (1) the church of the open 
country with its decaying neighborhood; (2) the church 
of the town with its immediate hinterland representing 
distances over which increasing numbers of people go to the 
center but where many are not yet closely enough attached 
to the center to desire to go; (3) the church of the town 
itself enjoying new prestige and prosperity as the country’s 
capital; (4) churches of the residential portions of cities, 
poor, middle class, and rich; (5) churches of the suburbs, 
industrial or residential. In addition to these, the out¬ 
standing types of specialized neighborhoods create corre- 


H. Paul Douglass 


231 

sponding churches: (6) churches of apartment house sec¬ 
tions; (7) of downtown centers; (8) of specialized types 
of areas, like foreign-speaking neighborhoods where pecul¬ 
iar populations are colonized; (9) student communities 
and the like. 

At the same time in no average typical city do the ma¬ 
jority of churches reflect the environmental type in any 
clear-cut fashion. Churches increasingly escape immediate 
environmental fashioning by reason of mobility and selec¬ 
tive regrouping of population by special interests. The 
community to which the church most profoundly corre¬ 
sponds is some phase of the total inclusive political and 
cultural community, the nation, which comprehends local 
communities of all types. 

At first sight, then, in the longer perspective and the 
more general national view, the correspondence between 
church and community appears to be better established 
and more complete than when viewed from the standpoint 
of the local churches and their respective varied communi¬ 
ties. Change is less conspicuous. The stable character of 
the general situation, at a fairly low level, to be sure, im¬ 
presses. The church is the church of the American people 
— authentically embedded in their culture, entrenched in 
popular feeling and belief, and profoundly related to the 
national life. It is from the standpoint of its local com¬ 
munities that the church chiefly appears as an unstable as¬ 
sociation — one which has suffered much buffeting about 
by social change and is doubtless destined to suffer more. 
Its adaptations to the current trend are incomplete and of 
doubtful adequacy. To be sure certain obvious gains 
from current changes are also manifest. Yet who can be 
wholly comfortable, in view of all the facts, as to what the 
future holds in store for the church? 


232 


Church and Community 


3. SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS 

The two preceding sections have described some of the 
more pertinent objective relations of church and commu¬ 
nity as they appear, first, within the more inclusive com¬ 
munity, the nation; and then in the primary community 
units, the neighborhoods, towns, and cities of the United 
States. 

It is the purpose of this section to inquire into the sig¬ 
nificance of the facts discovered. The most obvious first 
step in this direction is to widen the horizon of inquiry. 
Other institutions exist side by side with the church within 
the nation and in the same communities. By consulting 
their experiences and those of the communities as they are 
changing with the evolution of their component elements 
(of which the church is one) one may discover how much 
they have in common. 

Such a wider survey brings one directly into the domain 
of the social studies. Considerable use of their results has 
already been made in preceding sections. Now one comes 
to ask the direct question: How does the student of society 
interpret the phenomena concerned? Obviously, it is only 
his immediate conclusions which matter. These have to 
be turned over to the more ultimate judgment of religious 
persons for authentication or rejection. Religion has the 
final word in matters concerning itself. 

Now, a survey of social tendencies throws very imme¬ 
diate light upon the case of the church in the modern 
world. It discovers a process running throughout modern 
society which is changing it generally from a set of com¬ 
munities to a set of associations. The new principle of 
human association which was earlier traced as affecting the 
church, affects equally all types of American institutions. 
It has broadened when it has not broken neighborhood 


H. Paul Douglass 


233 

limits and freed human relations from the accident of 
contiguity. It has reconstituted, not the church alone, 
but a great variety of voluntary groups, out of slenderly at¬ 
tached persons without strong common roots. These it 
has drawn together, often from great distances, according 
to subtle selective affinities, to associate with one another 
with only a fraction of their personalities. The church’s 
experience is thus of a piece with the general experience 
of modern society. The process has brought increasing 
proportions of people into voluntary participation in as¬ 
sociation enterprises (of which the church is but one) 
and has left the thus attenuated institutions numerically 
larger and qualitatively more varied than ever before. 

The major significance of this set of differentiating 
changes comes to light when it is considered that all the 
separate social institutions are relatively of recent origin. 
Primitive society was like a worm which might be cut in 
two at any point, leaving segments which were substan¬ 
tially alike. “ There is no separate organization of reli¬ 
gion, still less of religions.” Primitive society 

may have a fairly elaborate system of ceremonial offices and a 
more elaborate system of kin distinction than is characteristic 
of evolved society, but there are few groupings or categories 
under which for the practical purpose of cooperative living, 
the members fall. . . . To be a member of the kin is ipso facto 
to share the common and inclusive rights and obligations, the 
rituals, standards, and beliefs of the whole. 5 

With such anciently established origins, the social unity 
of primary communities is profoundly rooted in the es¬ 
sential nature of man as evolved through long ages. The 
common life of the tribe or clan is the primeval and natural 
expression of collective will. In contrast with such pro¬ 
found social ties, the separate associations of modern so- 
s Maclver, op. cit., p. 431. 


Church and Community 


234 

cieties are merely afterthoughts, hasty constructions into 
which multitudes of individual wills are more or less de¬ 
liberately drawn for quite limited purposes. This, it has 
been pointed out, gives the association a quasi-contractual 
character, as contrasted with community. It is relatively 
artificial, and is voluntary rather than inevitable. The 
primitive unity of community is still in considerable meas¬ 
ure expressed in neighborhoods and villages. Cities, on 
the contrary, reflect an essentially associative type of so¬ 
ciety. All modern nations are moving in this direction. 
Association is supplanting community as the nucleating 
principle of society. 

This transition is, perhaps, the crucial test of the plas¬ 
ticity of human nature. According to Spengler, human 
nature cannot successfully adapt itself to the degree of 
differentiation and specialization involved in city life. Ur¬ 
banization accordingly bears the seeds of its own destruc¬ 
tion. 

In contrast, then, with community which implies a com¬ 
mon focus for all of life, each association stands as an 
organized single purpose within life. Membership in an 
association is not co-extensive with the total population 
of the community. Rather a fraction of the population 
has directed its attention to this or that aspect of the pre¬ 
viously shared life of the communal group, now isolated 
as an object of special concern. In behalf of this particular 
interest, rather than in behalf of life as a whole, it creates 
social structures and carries on specific functions. This 
means that each aspect selected for attention has to be 
separately evaluated as more or less important than the 
others. As a result of this evaluation any one of them may 
be dropped out entirely from one’s scheme of living. No 
one is taken for granted as all of the functions of the primi¬ 
tive community are and have to be. 


H. Paul Douglass 


235 

Again, the object of each association is limited. For 
what it is worth, more or less, men rally to it and life gets 
organized about it. It secures continuity of attention, not 
according to its accidental rating within the common tra¬ 
dition, but increasingly according to the contemporary 
strength of its value. As organized about such special in¬ 
terests, the life of society is controlled by more particular 
standards, and by more inward standards, ethically speak¬ 
ing, than those of the original community. The associa¬ 
tion is selective in the sense that there are ways of getting 
out of it. But one may also stay inside and criticize it. 
Its arrangements are not so fixed as those of communal 
society. This implies that the association marks a more 
plastic phase of social organization and potentially a more 
progressive. Finally, in contrast with the passivity of com¬ 
munal society, association is purposive; it is more or less 
clearly conscious of what interest it serves and it renders 
that interest a different and far more complex type of 
loyalty than that of habitual response to communal situa¬ 
tions. In a word, the loyalties due to association are al¬ 
ways compatible with questioning and change. 

Now, society of the sort which has just been characterized 
has selected religion from among, and along with, others 
of the shared communal interests, has directed special 
attention toward it, and has given it differentiated develop¬ 
ment. Within the social process in its associative phase, 
the ends of religion thus come to be served more con¬ 
sciously and directly and with more particular loyalty than 
they ever were in primitive society. The church, to be 
sure, originated centuries ago as a differentiated commu¬ 
nal institution. Its development was so epochal that Durk- 
heim holds that what humanity had prior to it was not 
religion at all. Now, however, it is clearly coming to be 
a more highly differentiated association, and promises to 


Church and Community 


236 

develop indefinitely further on this line. It is selecting a 
larger and ever larger number of particular aspects of the 
religious field for separate and special concern, evaluation 
and organization. The end of this process is by no means 
in sight. 

Within such a situation, the church at any given time 
appears as simply one association among many in a society 
which ceased to be a closely integrated whole in any as¬ 
pect, and has become a collection of separately organized 
and often conflicting interests. The church, to be sure, by 
reason of its vast number of adherents, its colossal institu¬ 
tional structure and prestige, is one of the great associa¬ 
tions. But in spite of its magnitude, and its high private 
self-evaluation, its essential social character within the 
mundane sphere is not different from that of others. 

What manner of unity can prevail in a society thus made 
up of separate and largely artificial associations of which 
the church is but one? 

Obviously, the fundamental problem of any social order 
is how to harmonize unity and diversity, how to secure 
cooperative functioning among the unrelated if not con¬ 
flicting groups and tendencies; how to bring them together 
under some integrating principle. Expressed in most 
general terms, the ultimate aim of any society must be to 
achieve enough unity to hold itself together, to maintain 
enough control to keep its members united rather than 
divided, while at the same time leaving certain room for 
freedom of action on their part. 

Previous to the recent ominous rise of dictatorships mod¬ 
ern societies as a rule did not desire the kind of unity 
that completely suppresses the identity of diverse parts. 
Neither, on the other hand, did one find in them a type 
of separation which prevented the unified action of the 
different members. Modern societies at least attempt to 


H. Paul Douglass 


237 

maintain both unity and diversity, through a process of 
federating rather than obliterating parts within the whole. 
This federal principle inheres in and finds expression in 
the function and structure of the entire social order. The 
reference of the term is not limited to political relations. 
It applies equally to relations between local communities 
and the national communities, and between parts and 
wholes within voluntary associations. The local neigh¬ 
borhoods and church congregations, for example, with 
which this study began, are federated within the unity 
of the nation and of their respective denominations. And 
this is true of churches in a sociological sense, irrespective 
of their differences in ecclesiastical polity. Even if one 
does not go all the way with the federationists to make this 
the primary principle of social organization, the federative 
process is deeply rooted in the constitution of modern 
society. 

Society, then, not merely has for its primary units num¬ 
bers of associations, but the relationships which hold them 
together are federal in nature rather than strictly organic. 
For a social tie they depend upon accommodation and 
compromise, to harmonize mutually recognized comple¬ 
mentary differences, each leaving room for the other to 
exercise itself with as much freedom as possible but with¬ 
out reference to any single dominant principle of inte¬ 
gration. 

In many respects the outworking of the social process 
shows striking capacity to secure order among diverse 
elements without preacknowledged unity of idea or ex¬ 
ternal authority, by reason of a seemingly immanent and 
continuously emergent harmonizing principle. As the 
organ alike of all human potentialities and of actual life 
history of mankind, the course of events is forever bring¬ 
ing into being a social order whose essential form is that 


Church and Community 


238 

of a unity in diversity. Many students of society simply 
accept the creative emergence of order into an infinitely 
tangled situation, in which no prior principle of order 
can be discerned, as something “ given ” which furnishes 
solid grounds for social expectancy — like the sun’s rising. 
It is easy for religious minds to read in such a phenomenon 
the overruling providence of God. At the present crisis 
in human evolution, however, deeply disquieting ques¬ 
tions arise. To what degree is the capacity of the social 
process to achieve order a hold-over of the power of primi¬ 
tive mores, controls which arose prior to social differentia¬ 
tion and which still for a time serve to keep life within its 
grooves and to give it a certain balance? What will hap¬ 
pen when these controls become exhausted with the 
growth of the associative principle? All along, what some 
personalize as a satanic principle in society, and what 
others psychologize as its demonic element, has now and 
again gotten out of hand and tragically shown the limita¬ 
tions of the capacity of the social process to produce har¬ 
monious order. When differentiation has done its full 
work and the communal mores lack renewal of power, 
what shall hold society together? Lacking the presump¬ 
tion of universality, in any of its associations, will not so¬ 
ciety as a whole be getting out of hand altogether? May 
we not be confronted with literal demoralization and con¬ 
sequent disintegration in the very hour of the increasing 
effectiveness of external techniques and instrumentation? 

This question simply echoes the oft-repeated judgment 
that material progress has far outstripped moral discipline. 
One recalls again the doubt whether the changing from 
communal to associative terms of living is not literally ab¬ 
normal, contrary to human nature, and constituting an 
overstrain which humanity cannot bear. Obviously, if 
humanity is not capable of making the change, there is no 


H. Paul Douglass 


239 

remedy but to seek to go back to some authoritarian prin¬ 
ciple of communal society. 

More and more, then, as gains of civilization fail to 
produce social cohesion, as a federalized society proves the 
lack of a sufficient principle of unity, is an invitation 
placed before some association with power and a sense of 
responsibility to attempt the integration and control of the 
human situation. The two natural contenders for this 
role, in view of their histories, are the church and the state. 

In recent years, it must be admitted, the state has shown 
the greatest inclination to attempt this role — and indeed 
possibly the greater capacity for leadership, whether au¬ 
thoritarian or spiritual. Characterized as the church is by 
the intellectual unoriginality and vagueness and by the 
moral indecisiveness of its dominant popular religion, and 
vexed as it is by evolution in different directions at the 
same time, its inadequacy as a center of the reintegration 
of society has often been pointed out. When the church’s 
associative tendencies have permitted it to achieve greater 
ethical sensitiveness and to make pioneering advances be¬ 
yond common standards, the danger has been that her 
moral superiority might reflect merely the code of a select 
group, not the general habits of a people. The rather 
ridiculous failures of the church when under such circum¬ 
stances she has adopted “ pressure group ” tactics and tried 
to enforce minority standards upon an unconvinced age, 
are painfully familiar. 

Nevertheless, by reason alike of its inalienable sense of 
origins in a supra-mundane social world and of its genius 
and history, the church simply cannot give over its responsi¬ 
bility for the control of civilizations. She has grave cause 
for doubt whether any other association possesses or may 
hope to possess the access to the springs of human life or 
the compelling and controlling common symbols of unity 


Church and Community 


240 

and order which she herself has. The church simply must 
make good its universalistic assumptions — and that with¬ 
out compulsion — otherwise she will probably be com¬ 
pelled to surrender social control to a compulsive state. 

It is obviously unfair at this point to draw the contrast 
between the church and that strangest caricature of the 
corporate interpretation of life, namely, the romantic to¬ 
talitarian state in its insane attempt to make neighbor¬ 
hood blood-brotherhood the basis alike of nationality and 
of religion. Because the clan families of the primitive 
horde constituted kinship groups, totalitarianism has to 
erect a false and pretentious theory of race and to presume 
that a modern national civil society can be based on such 
primitive relationships. Under this pretense, the church 
must be coextensive with and virtually undifferentiated 
from the folk, accepting and perpetuating the mores of the 
blood brotherhood. The church which cannot sink com¬ 
pletely to the primitive communal level remains a thorn 
in the flesh of the totalitarian state. 

There can, however, exist a very much milder version 
of the role and responsibility of the modern state — one 
quite compatible with the democratic political tradition 
— which equally raises the theoretical issue of relation¬ 
ships between it and the church. 

Now there exists no democratic state today which has 
not gone far toward becoming the organ of idealistic con¬ 
cern for human welfare, going far beyond former politi¬ 
cal tradition. The state is increasingly concerning itself 
with the economic opportunities of its people seeking not 
merely negatively to restrain special privileges, but posi¬ 
tively in considerable degree to equalize them through a 
variety of measures such as work relief, unemployment 
insurance, and old-age pensions. The late Walter Rausch- 
enbush thought that the American state was already 


H. Paul Douglass 241 

“ Christian ” except in economic affairs. It has rapidly 
become “ Christian ” in this realm also. 

Hence it is open, as never before, for good and loyal 
men to question whether the state is less omnipotent and 
effective — or indeed less sincere — than is the church at 
the same or similar tasks. 

Considered more philosophically, one needs to appre¬ 
ciate what Professor Ernest Barker has shown in his paper 
on this same topic, that the state is an indubitably authen¬ 
tic creation of society, not a mere legal entity created by 
contract or legislation: 

It is a legal association, a juridical organization, which has 
been constituted from a previously existing whole. That 
whole is a people, nation, society, or community. When it be¬ 
comes a state, or comes to be regarded as a state, this whole does 
not cease to be what it was. ... It simply adds a different 
form and a new and separate mode. 

Professor Barker goes on to argue that the main work 
of the state is, in fact, not compulsive, but rather 

for the most part “ endorsement ” or “ taking over ” — setting 
its imprimatur, the seal of its force, on what more flexible ac¬ 
tivities or the mere progress of life have wrought out in long 
years of adventurous experiment or silent growth. The com¬ 
munity is thus a laboratory for the state. 

Now, so long as the democratic state merely enacts what 
the authentic processes of the common life have estab¬ 
lished, what further limit need be set to its activities? 
It remains thus a possible dream of wise and holy men 
that most of the idealistic effort of society shall be done 
under forms of state action. In this dream the churches 
are united, along with other voluntary associations, to play 
a mere ancillary part. Of this attitude the impending pos¬ 
sibility of a dominant WPA culture in the United States 
is sufficient evidence. 


Church and Community 


242 

Speaking on behalf of the nonecclesiastical voluntary 
agencies of society, Professor Barker proceeds to declare: 

The community is also a laboratory for itself. It may hand 
over some of its inventions to be “ endorsed." But there is 
much that need not be endorsed, and cannot be endorsed. 
There are things we can discover for ourselves, and do for our¬ 
selves, in the field of community life, which had better remain 
in that field, and indeed must remain in that field. The part¬ 
nership in science and art, “ all virtue and every perfection," 
must again and again run into the form of law; but it must 
equally, and even more, remain at point after point in its own 
fluid form — for otherwise science and art and virtue and per¬ 
fection will be petrified in the form of compulsion. 

When the church uses such arguments, its opposition to 
state action is often suspected of being merely the jealous 
reaction of an equally power-loving institution. To this 
— along with humble confession that it may at times have 
been true — a sufficient answer should be the church’s in¬ 
effaceable conviction that she is somehow the appointed 
organ of the life and reign of God among men. 

4. ELEMENTS OF A POSSIBLE SOLUTION 

But is it at all possible to maintain so exalted a view of 
the church in the face of objective, stern realities? If, as in 
this paper, the church is viewed as a reflection of commu¬ 
nities and nation and as a force in the world in competition 
with that of other organized associations, including the 
state, which neither theoretically nor practically admit the 
church’s version of its own sanctions, what likelihood is 
there that the church will be able to play a really dominant 
role in the modern world, or that it can hope to effect the 
reintegration of society without resort to compulsion 
through spiritual force, when society has begun to go to 
pieces? Are there objective considerations which suggest 
any possible solution for its problems? 


H. Paul Douglass 


243 

The prospect indeed appears hopeless from any con¬ 
sistent Catholic standpoint which identifies church and 
community on the communal level. 

From the Catholic standpoint, one is born into the re¬ 
ligious community or becomes a member thereof auto¬ 
matically by the accident of living within its bounds. It 
does not consist of a voluntarily constituted group of indi¬ 
viduals as an association does. Following the communal 
clue, the Catholic baptizes into the church anyone born 
into the Christian community of which the church is the 
religious aspect of the common life. Thereafter, one re¬ 
mains a Christian in status and, unless excommunicated, 
the church will bury him according to its offices of the 
church, declaring that he has died in the faith. 

Now it would not be impossible for the Catholic to 
borrow Professor Barker’s argument as previously cited, 
and to maintain that a people, nation, society, or commu¬ 
nity might incarnate itself in a church quite as truly as in 
a state, as a different form and new and separate mode of 
a more primitive social reality. This is indeed essentially 
what the Catholic believes ought to happen, under divine 
appointment; and, on the strength of the ubiquity of popu¬ 
lar religion, the all but universal indirect adherence of the 
total population to the church, and the partially expressed 
assumptions of law and custom that this is a Christian na¬ 
tion, it would in the past have been quite possible to hold 
that this is what has actually happened. 

But the social process has gone too far in dislodging 
men from their communal ties to make this position prac¬ 
tically tenable. Social interpretation, as has been seen, is 
inclined to break up society itself into loosely federalized 
units. There is no actual entity corresponding to the 
words “ people ” or “ nation ” which could incarnate itself 
as a church. The immense gains of the associative princi- 


Church and Community 


244 

pie as the actual basis of social organization are all against 
the church’s hope to realize such a role as to be a people’s 
other and better self, or as that of the “ nation on its knees.” 

But the situation appears equally hopeless from the in¬ 
dividualistic Protestant viewpoint. The manifestly com¬ 
munal roots of popular religion go far too deep to make 
it sociologically defensible to trust in the relation of the 
single soul to God, or to regard the church as something 
which one can take or leave at will. Neither religion, nor 
any other major interest, can hope for a solution of its 
problems in individualism alone. 

Now it should be noted that in none of its classic ex¬ 
pressions is Protestantism individualistic. Either it seeks 
to establish the political rule of religion through a Chris¬ 
tian state, as it does in its more churchly version, or, in its 
sectarian phase, it strives for a society of holy men main¬ 
tained through methodical discipline. In short, historic 
Protestantism, quite as much as Catholicism, makes reli¬ 
gion essentially corporate. Thus, quite accurately, the 
Church of England in the Prayer Book controversy re¬ 
minds Parliament that the church is no mere voluntary 
association but quite as basic a part of the national life as 
the state itself. The essential difference is that Protestant¬ 
ism defines corporateness on the associative rather than on 
the communal level. 

It is sound Protestantism as well as good sociology to 
realize that none of the great associations of mankind orig¬ 
inate specifically in the will of man, but rather in the 
organic wholeness of his social nature and the inheritances 
of the social process to which he is subject. His associa¬ 
tions are not combinations of social atoms, either of men 
who first privately arrive at significant experiences or of 
interests on behalf of which they subsequently associate. 
On the contrary, all the great associations are themselves 


H. Paul Douglass 


245 

personality-creating bearers of the social heredity. Cul¬ 
ture is as inevitably inherited as any organic characteristic. 
From these antecedent social factors the impulses of indi¬ 
viduals are received, their characters are derived. In being 
increasingly transformed into association, the church does 
not escape from its ancient roots in the corporate social 
order; and this, whatever their legal status, is equally true 
sociologically speaking of the American churches collec¬ 
tively as of historic established churches. 

When all this is said, however, it is still conspicuously 
true that Protestantism puts its main hopes for religion in 
the less inevitable social characteristics which identify as¬ 
sociation. It insists on ultimate voluntary personal ac¬ 
ceptance of the inherited religious position; upon religion 
as inwardly distinctive; upon its unique and separate su¬ 
premacy; also upon its compatibility with questioning and 
change and upon its demand for intelligent loyalty. In 
these considerations the dynamics of Protestantism will 
always be found. It can at the same time consistently ac¬ 
cept vast backing from the authentic though static in¬ 
fluences of tradition which are actually present in Ameri¬ 
can popular religion as exemplified in the life of the actual 
churches. 

All this is but to say that objective grounds of hope for 
the church’s dominant role in social integration are to 
be found, first of all, in the manifoldness of the contem¬ 
porary social processes. Evolution itself is not entirely 
consistent. It is not moving in merely one direction. The 
forces behind its major trends are not inexhaustible and 
the more primitive principles of association are not utterly 
abandoned to more recent ones. Surely if this mixture of 
forces can co-exist in the community itself they can also 
do so in the church. 

Institutionally speaking, the church is by no means 


Church and Community 


246 

down and out. Its striking numerical growth, the fact 
that its institutional strength is now at the peak, at least 
in the United States, reflects a situation which is partly 
stable and partly changing, and in which both stability 
and change are at least in part on the church’s side. In 
other words, the church continues to utilize both com¬ 
munal and associative principles of social organization. 
Not infrequently it binds the same person to itself in both 
the aspects of his nature which are reflected in these two 
principles. 

That apparently dominant trends are not inexhaustible 
is shown, for example, in the fact that the breakdown of 
the neighborhood is already largely over. As the first ef¬ 
fects of acute mobility have expended themselves, after 
much shifting and sifting, the neighborhood, with some 
loss of significance, largely survives — just as all the aspects 
and major arrangements of social life are likely to survive. 
Urbanization, in fact, has by no means reached all city 
people. Multitudes still live in racial colonies and ghet- 
toes, and by reason of habit and ignorance are still locality- 
bound. The hold-over of rural-mindedness keeps still 
others to a narrow round of social and ethical relationships. 
Clannishness is diluted but not abolished. 

One of the best illustrations of the incompleteness of the 
shift to any principle of association is to be found in the 
highly conventional character of the work of the Protestant 
ministry. This takes virtually the same forms, expressed 
in about the same proportion in country, town, and city. 
Such a result is, indeed, intelligible with respect to the 
majority of churches which are too feeble or too tradi¬ 
tional to modify themselves even under acute social pres¬ 
sure. It may also, in large measure, be due to the fact 
that most ministers are of humble origin, rurally bred, that 
they have spent most of a brief average career in rural 


H. Paul Douglass 


247 

churches, and have never really gotten the hang of the city. 
Nevertheless, the fact that under the intensest impulses of 
urban environment, where innovation is most loudly 
called for, the continued exercising of the priestly office, 
preaching, pastoral work — along with the running of 
churches as a business enterprise — continue to constitute 
the chief block of the minister’s work (exactly as they do 
in the country parish), tends to show how deep are the 
church’s roots in traditionalism and how profoundly it 
is justified in depending upon traditionalism as a major 
support. 

Looking further afield, it will probably be concluded 
that most of the failures of advanced associations — for 
example, the failure to utilize specialists in government; 
the predilection of the American people for untrained 
politicians, poorly trained teachers and preachers; the ad¬ 
ministration of local government on personal rather than 
legal lines; the habitually low estimate put upon the serv¬ 
ices of experts — all these and much else merely indicate 
the survival of undifferentiated communal traits as the 
basis of society, in contrast with its effective organization 
through the differentiation of special functions and in¬ 
terests. 

Part at least of the church’s own salvation, as well as 
the likelihood that it can rally society about it, lies in the 
survival of such traits against the more recent trend. The 
sway of popular religion, with its robust, vulgar acceptance 
of supra-human postulates, and the common adoption 
of a quasi-Christian ethics, constitute at least a background 
for true religion, a case in which “ he that is not against us 
is on our part.” Common worship, even when it merely 
celebrates life without criticizing it, has an enormous in¬ 
tegrating influence. Finally, philosophically speaking, 
there is something to be said for the authentic and con- 


Church and Community 


248 

structive role of the less rational and more emotional ele¬ 
ments in human nature against the attempt of man to live 
too exclusively on the plane of reason and deliberation. 
The church is wise to trust in its deep rootage in ancient 
communal soil, which has always nourished strong men 
and social groups. 

Moreover, some of the consequences of social change 
and even confusion, Protestantism, on the associative level, 
definitely accepts as better than any actual alternative 
could be. 

In the first place, the Protestant need not be unduly 
disturbed by the church’s progressive loss of function. The 
fate of the modern church is often described as that of 
an institution which is steadily losing its former functions 
in competition with others. Specialization, it is said, has 
removed, one after the other, from beneath the hand and 
shadow of the church such crucial matters as the local ad¬ 
ministration of justice, education, and the practice of the 
fine arts. What remains to the churches is functionally a 
mere shadow of its ampler self. Pictured on a larger can¬ 
vas, however, what one more truly discerns is a process of 
disentanglement from communal society of one function 
after another, and its erection into a separate institutional¬ 
ized interest. In no true sense did the church ever have 
primary control of the functions alleged to be lost. It is 
true that, following the collapse of ancient civilization, the 
medieval Catholic Church became a sort of receiver for 
society, temporarily gathered up the whole range of com¬ 
munity functions and attempted to administer them. In 
the longer perspective, this should be regarded simply as an 
episode pending a normal redistribution of functions to the 
institutions which were in process of evolving and which 
have since independently established themselves. The 
primitive Christian church certainly attempted no mo- 


H. Paul Douglass 


249 

nopolistic control of functions of the community, and in 
the largest sense the church’s alleged loss of function sim¬ 
ply becomes part of the general problem of social differen¬ 
tiation and the relation of specialized interests and institu¬ 
tions within a more complex type of social whole. 

Obviously more serious and challenging is the alleged 
failure of the church’s common voice as a source of moral 
authority in the modern world. The church’s social ef¬ 
fectiveness in the face of the evils of the present social order 
is widely lamented. It is charged with institutional paraly¬ 
sis. Identification of the church and the world are thought 
to have gone so far that the salt has almost entirely lost its 
savor. 

But this outcome, it is pointed out, is inevitable, now 
that the church is identified with so large a fraction of 
population. The church as sect may strive for purity and 
so long as it is small enough to exercise intimate discipline 
may secure at least the purity of outward conformity. The 
church as an inclusive major human association, as a volun¬ 
tary movement rallying to its membership more than half 
the population, as it does in the United States, and receiv¬ 
ing a certain nominal adherence from most of the re¬ 
mainder, actually receives within itself the moral standards 
of the population which it thus includes. From the stand¬ 
point of New Testament Christianity or of modern ethical 
sensitiveness, the average moral level is unquestionably 
and shockingly low. 

But so long as religion was primitively identified with 
the community this same problem of the low moral level 
existed. It is only the church as an association, particu¬ 
larly in its sectarian form, which has ever been in position 
to set itself in contrast with the community and earnestly 
strive to attain, generally, a superior moral level. Now 
success in “ evangelizing ” the population on the voluntary 


Church and Community 


250 

associative basis has created a novel type of ecclesiastical 
institution in the United States. 

For whatever the origins, it is sure that the American 
churches in the main are no longer sects, but are rather 
institutional exponents of popular religion, constituting 
essentially a cross section of the community. In propor¬ 
tion as they have succeeded on this basis, internal disci¬ 
pline has become lax. And so great a variety of moral 
attitudes has become included within its borders that it is 
impossible to line up the church as a whole behind any 
particular ethical idea or requirement except the very most 
conventional. Little trace is left of the divine institution 
which by virtue of the assumption of its theocratic origins 
sought to dominate life. Especially has it become diffi¬ 
cult for the church to exhibit an internal quality of life fit 
to serve as a principle for organizing the whole life of 
humanity. 

Yet even this state is better than to have no half- 
leavening of the nation by popular religion which, indeed, 
always falls below the ideal, yet can always be appealed 
to as against its own low levels. There is at least a theo¬ 
retical admission of the higher standards; and popular re¬ 
ligion is always ready to admit the discrepancy when its 
deficiencies are pointed out. Rigorists, who argue that a 
church of the “ saving remnant ” utterly disassociated 
from the world would be in a stronger moral position, 
rarely consider what kind of world it would have to con¬ 
tend with if society were not already largely diluted by 
Christianity. 

Finally, Protestantism can even afford to put up with the 
notorious lack of cohesion within the church itself in order 
to gain the still profounder advantages of thoroughgoing 
differentiation in religion. 

When the church’s institutional development is not on 


H. Paul Douglass 


251 

behalf of specialized interests, such as worship, evangelism, 
education, benevolence, or missions, it chiefly reflects dif¬ 
ferentiation according to the age, sex, or status of its con¬ 
stituents. There must be a rerendering of every interest 
and almost of every value for every age, for children, ado¬ 
lescents, young adults, women’s organizations rise to dupli¬ 
cate the general organizations of the church. Clergy and 
laity differentiate their interests and develop separate, 
often parallel organs. Virtually every secondary institu¬ 
tional aspect of the church thus wears a double qualifica¬ 
tion; it organizes the missionary interests of women, the 
recreational interests of youth, the financial interests of 
boards of trustees, the professional interests of clergymen, 
etc. There must be religion for the preschool child, reli¬ 
gion for the man over sixty-five. Veterans of future theo¬ 
logical wars must separately indulge in anticipatory bat¬ 
tles. Finally, the infinite detail of religion obscures 
religion’s self. One cannot see the wood for the trees. 

But all this subdivision, by interest and by age, sex, and 
status, does not mean merely that the church as an insti¬ 
tution is being overorganized; it means that religion is, 
so to speak, being aerated. By such a breaking up of its 
particles, they are brought into maximum exposure to the 
atmosphere of reality and relevancy. Unquestionably the 
most general diffusion and circulation of things religious, 
the greatest lay participation in the church, the widest 
contact of religion with life, is wrought in this way. At 
least, like it or not, this is contemporary Protestantism’s 
way. 

However, no complete or well rendered expectancy for 
the church’s dominant place in the community can with 
any certainty be derived from the mere survival of un¬ 
differentiated communal quality in popular religion and 
just as little from the negative successes of the associative 


Church and Community 


252 

principle. And the issue is not whether and for how long 
traditionalism will support ecclesiasticism, or whether 
matters might not be worse for the church than they are. 
The issue is whether the church has energy enough to save 
the demoralized world from falling back into chaos and 
whether she can reinstate religion as the central integrat¬ 
ing force in society — something which has never yet been 
done on the large scale of modern society and under con¬ 
ditions of intellectual and political freedom. 

The leaven of the associative processes is, however, 
working in certain more originative and constructive ways. 
No one of them by itself may be conspicuous, but all to¬ 
gether they should serve. The church, for example, has 
a right to rely heavily upon the growing use of the tech¬ 
nique of democratic processes expressed in forums, discus¬ 
sion groups, etc., which subject traditional religion to free 
examination and attempt to work out its modern implica¬ 
tions, especially with reference to the community- Di¬ 
rected, as these processes may be, to the very problems of 
church and community which this paper is discussing, it 
is possible that they may discover how to combine religion 
as a special interest operating at the level of deliberate as¬ 
sociation with appreciation of and concern for the totality 
of community life. The common viewpoint, then, which 
has been abandoned on the level of instinct and tradition, 
thus comes back on the higher level of intelligence and 
ethical sensitiveness. 

In a more distinctly religious atmosphere, the contem¬ 
porary church is also developing a large number of inti¬ 
mate groups which by personal confession and discipline 
are seeking to associate their members in the terms of the 
deeper forces of their personalities. They unite with one 
another in conscious desire, not as specialized fragments of 
humanity, but in a profound attempt to integrate their 


H. Paul Douglass 


253 

common approach into an adequate experience of life 
under religious postulates. 

The number and variety of these “ groupers ” 6 is far 
greater than is sometimes suspected. In the United States, 
for example, one may point to a fellowship of young lib¬ 
erals who think that their “ radical rethinking of what 
constitutes reality in human life ” has resulted in “ a re¬ 
discovery of the fact that the reflection of this reality . . . 
is never private but most deeply social.” They believe 
that the intimate processes of the life of the small group 
“ can arrive at points which represent common agreement 
which may well mark the beginning of new departures 
and thrilling disagreements.” Relying on this “ deeper 
harmony of human minds and more effectual cooperation 
of human wills ” in such a group, they hope “ to give a 
chance to ideas and disciplines which represent discovered 
truths.” “ The religious man,” they say, “ is he who, 
through the stimulation and help of a group and a tradi¬ 
tion, arrives at a belief as to the nature of God and who, 
on the basis of his belief, adopts a definite discipline which 
promotes growth.” The church is “ the social context out 
of which a generally accepted and progressively growing 
conception of the nature of reality may emerge.” Here, 
then, are the faith, the fellowship, and the discipline, all 
corporately arrived at, yet in no way fixed or beyond con¬ 
tinuous modification by the processes which brought them 
into existence. 

These young liberals have not explained how they ex¬ 
pect to piece out their objectively limited religious society 
into something pure, continuous with the historic church 
and the whole creative process of religion, and universal in 

6 Excerpts from papers presented at the Ministers’ Institute, September, 
1934, summarized in Unitarian Faces a New Age, Report of the Commis¬ 
sion of Appraisal, 1936, pp. 201-3. 


254 Church and Community 

present scope and power. But these problems confront 
the church under any conception of it, and the seekings of 
many intimate groups springing up throughout the church 
may well be expected to find fresh vitality and authen¬ 
ticity in religion on the associative level. 

One may also risk much on the conviction that no 
generation will be left without its true prophets through 
whom “ higher religion ” may exercise a genuinely crea¬ 
tive and constructively critical function toward both the 
church and the community of which they are a part. 
Nothing in the objective situation can guarantee the 
timely appearance of such prophets in the hour of the 
church’s necessity, yet God has never left himself without a 
witness; and what can be more obvious than that the 
church and society can neither undergo inevitable break 
with the past, nor meet the strain of the demands of the 
new age without complete disintegration unless they are 
creatively reinforced as religion has so often been rein¬ 
forced in past ages? 

Given then a wide diffusion of democratic processes 
throughout the church, the development of a large num¬ 
ber of intimate groups seeking light and fellowship, and 
the providential emergence of creative leadership, it is not 
too much to hope that fresh values may begin to pour forth 
from ancient forms. Common worship, for example, is 
the essential activity of the church as a social body. Its 
instinct and tradition are essentially communal. Its as¬ 
piration links all worshiping assemblies and all spiritually 
sensitive souls, uniting the whole family of God on earth 
and in heaven. It draws broadly on the total religious 
inheritance of the race, dramatically supplies a noble 
frame of reference for religious imagination to build upon, 
and is climaxed by its distinctively Christian ideas and 
symbols. Because of its thus essentially integrative char¬ 
acter, it is the supreme corporate function of the church. 


H. Paul Douglass 


255 

Yet all this notwithstanding, worship may fail to rise 
above the communal level. As already said, it may be 
content to celebrate without criticizing life. In its associa¬ 
tive ranges, however, worship has developed a searching 
quality in the Christian church. One of the specialized 
functions of worship is to compare and criticize the totality 
of experience in the light of the distinctive Christian 
emphases. Worship may be merely a mass function. On 
the other hand, it may become a conscious process of re¬ 
grading values, and among the aspects of religion that 
worship needs most frequently to revalue is itself. It 
should ever seek a greater capacity to discover its implied 
larger meanings, as well as to evoke a more powerful in¬ 
tegrative climax in the worshiping group. This evaluator 
role needs, moreover, to be carried over into private and 
household worship; and it must be continuous if common 
worship is to remain really a stimulus, not an opiate, to the 
church in the modern world. 

The growing discontent on the part of ethically sensitive 
souls with the experienced consequences of the present 
social order, is beginning to develop within the church 
as well as outside it all sorts of groups of pioneers and 
adventurers. Some of them would draw the line sharply 
between the church and the world, forgetting secular saints, 
who have gone outside the church to fight essentially a 
common battle. Others appreciate and attempt to realize 
the possibilities of unity in variety. They are unwilling, 
for formal purity’s sake, to run off into sectarian separa¬ 
tions from contemporary life and from the confessedly 
deeply compromised church — which after all is compro¬ 
mised just because it is so profoundly rooted in the com¬ 
munity. But whatever tactics these moral radicals employ 
— and it would be a happy omen if more of them could 
get together in program — they constitute one of the most 
promising resources of the church today. 


Church and Community 


256 

A still more positive claim than the one suggested in an 
earlier section may properly be made for the value of the 
church’s attempt to make religion relevant by differentia¬ 
tion. 

Religion becomes relevant and applicable to life as lived 
and just in proportion as it evolves limited objectives 
which may be served in specific ways. This constitutes a 
sort of repeated decentralization of religious interest. The 
totality of religious reality suspended in solution in com¬ 
mon worship precipitates in the separate concern of the 
church. This illustrates intellectually and practically the 
familiar principle of the division of labor. Man has made 
all of his progress by splitting up the complex universe 
into manageable bits for secondary attack. Thus he makes 
progress in religion. The church with its institutionally 
developed, separately departmentalized interests is just the 
application of this method, each interest with its day, sea¬ 
son, or occasion. 

But the Catholicity of Protestantism is just its willing¬ 
ness to form a new committee or to erect a new unit of per¬ 
manent structure for the service of the last interest which 
may differentiate itself and up to the last ramification of 
gradation in religion. The problem of Protestant organ¬ 
ization is patiently to reintegrate today what was divided 
only yesterday, and to keep the total integrative functions 
as active and effective as the differentiating ones. And in 
point of fact, both in the local churches, and on national 
levels, denominationally and interdenominationally, a vast 
proportion of Protestant energy is now going into reorgani¬ 
zations and unifications. Marked centralizing tendencies 
are under way within many of the looser-organized denomi¬ 
nations. 

The continuousness of this process of differentiation 
and reintegration explains why the church is always re- 


257 


H. Paul Douglass 

minding some people of a factory slowed down for recon¬ 
struction or a business closed for alterations. “ Why,” ask 
pious souls, “ this repeated loss of momentum while tink¬ 
ering with ecclesiastical machinery? ” The answer is obvi¬ 
ous: If the church’s re-evaluation of its own interests is 
to be broken, if its self-criticism is to be constant and 
relentless, if every movement of differentiation is to be 
matched by one of integration, then the church must be 
forever making external institutional alterations. Prob¬ 
ably on the whole, the most convincing evidence of its 
vital thinking is its changes in established institutional 
structure. The function of thinking is to solve problems, 
but not until the new idea has compelled tradition to move 
over and give it structural place. Not until it has imple¬ 
mented itself with adequate agencies, is the problem really 
solved. What worship does symbolically and emotionally 
to integrate religion, the church does sociologically 
through the continuous reorganization of her institutional 
functions, not through the ebullitions of more advanced 
clergy. 

Now, while Protestantism is congenial with and on the 
whole committed to this method of perpetually bringing 
additional differentiated aspects and segments of life under 
the interpretative sway of religion — staking its future on 
the capacity of the process to reach universality — it 
manifestly cannot go on indefinitely with a mere process of 
differentiation balanced by reintegration. Religion must 
be relevant to life as a whole. In order to make itself so, 
religion has first to manifest the wholeness of life to the 
world. 

Protestantism, accordingly, needs to make perpetual 
fresh effort to achieve the Catholic mind and temper. If 
the modern world is to find unity, some agency must offer 
a viewpoint focal enough to synthesize contemporary life 


Church and Community 


258 

on the religious level and must express it in compelling 
religious terms. Religion must recover the universalistic 
note. It must learn to integrate the organized life of the 
world without coercing its variants into conformity. This 
is the supreme intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and technical 
task of the age. 

But these things, which go far deeper than our strivings 
on these planes — who, then, is sufficient for them? What 
can really guarantee the integration of life as a whole about 
the distinctively Christian elements in religion? While 
the church’s life is so palpably a series of Christian frag¬ 
ments, there can be no external guarantee. The distinc¬ 
tively Christian elements must somehow be able to make 
themselves central in competition with others. In this 
effort they have the enormous backing of the Christian 
social tradition which seeks ideally to sum up all things in 
Christ. But this heritage itself is subject to a social process 
within which there are all manner of tendencies, bad and 
good. Unless, then, God energizes within the process to 
secure the supremacy of the Christian elements, integra¬ 
tion may conceivably take place about some other center. 
But it is the very essence of the doctrine of the “ indwelling 
Spirit ” that results according to the will of God will cre¬ 
atively emerge into objective being. If God does continu¬ 
ously so energize, then by virtue of this immanent divine 
life the church may not alone fulfill a fundamental role in 
social causation as the leaven within the lump, but realize 
as well the final dream of religion — that of a social process 
for ever incorporating the body of Christ into the life of 
humanity. 

If we seek objective grounds for this faith, we find back¬ 
ing in the discovery that human nature is manifold, cor¬ 
responding to a varied universe of which it is a part. That 
all things are summed up in God, accordingly, remains 


H. Paul Douglass 


259 

forever an affirmation of faith. That the values which 
religion seeks to incarnate are supreme values is itself a 
judgment. That social disintegration can be stopped, and 
that social control can be achieved in harmony with hu¬ 
man freedom — in brief, that any of the values which 
ought to be ascendant can be made ascendant without 
physical coercion, is substantiating a thing hoped for but 
not seen. Secular idealism cherishes its own version of all 
these assumptions, and is essentially on the same footing 
with the church with respect to the roots of them. The 
two idealisms will do well, therefore, if they can get to¬ 
gether. 

Summing up finally the case of the church in the mod¬ 
ern world, one finds it entangled by sociological necessity, 
and in the province of God with a half-Christian commu¬ 
nity from which it is able, in some degree, to disentangle 
itself to specialized attention to its own field. Here it can 
develop critical detachment, spiritual insight, ethical sen¬ 
sitiveness, and flexible loyalties. At the same time, it is 
fortunately unable to break its more conventional com¬ 
munal ties. The church’s prospect is, then, that it will 
persist for a long time, perhaps permanently, in an equivo¬ 
cal position. It will share the manifoldness of human na¬ 
ture and the complexity of existence. Its victory will lie 
in its continuing confidence in the force and relevancy of 
its message applied to particular situations, in no one of 
which is it ever wholly successful, but in no one of which 
does it ever wholly fail. This victory is based, as it be¬ 
lieves, on the congruity of the Christian religious objec¬ 
tives and insights with the objective facts of the universe 
and the corresponding basic needs and undying aspirations 
of man. 


























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